Jim Brady said Friday evening that he stepped down as the head of TBD, the upstart Washington, D.C. news site, because he and Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive of Allbritton Communications, “had some — I would say minor — disagreements, but on many issues.”
Brady declined to go into detail about specific issues, but said there were not deep philosophical disagreements about TBD’s editorial approach. “Robert funded the site, Robert decides who he wants to drive it,” Brady said, “and I get to decide if I want to be the person who drives it.”
Allbritton said in a memo that “we decided to shake hands and go in different directions,” and Brady called it a “mutually agreed-upon separation” — a resignation.
In first reporting that Brady had left TBD, which Allbritton owns along with Politico, WJLA-TV and TBD-TV, Mediabistro reported, “We hear Publisher Robert Allbritton is planning to grow the company, but wants the emphasis on content — not just technology and aggregation, which are Brady’s strengths.”
A memo from Allbritton seemed to support the characterization: In announcing a “new round of investment in journalistic resources,” Allbritton wrote, “To me, the creation of outstanding original content has always been what will determine the long-term success of TBD.”
Brady, however, said any implication that he values “technology and curation [over content] belies everything I’ve spent 25 years in the business working on.”
“What journalist isn’t interested in having more original content?” he asked. “Being anti-content is like being anti-puppy.”
From the beginning — since before TBD had a name — Brady has emphasized that the site would rely on aggregating others’ content to supplement its original material. With a much smaller staff than that of his former employer, The Washington Post, Brady said TBD would cover the 5 million-person D.C. metro area by using staff reporting for big stories, and aggregation, data and geolocation for neighborhood-level news.
TBD aimed to cultivate those flowers with a community engagement team headed by Steve Buttry. When the site launched, there was one member of the community engagement team for every three reporters — a ratio unheard of for most news organizations. That community engagement team has built a network of nearly 200 independent blogs to which TBD regularly links.
On Friday, Brady said that there hadn’t been disagreement about that approach within the company.
“I don’t know what they’ll do going forward, but I hope that they’ll keep that balance of producing good, original content but also linking off to other sites, and being a good community member by doing that.”
He later tweeted, “For the record, I am both pro-aggregation and pro-content, despite what company e-mail said. No need for a Sophie’s choice.”
In a voicemail, TBD’s Erik Wemple said he doesn’t think “this means anything titanic … that there is a big mandate to do something massively different.”
Noting that the site is just three months old, he said, “It’s possible we could do more or less aggregation in the future; I don’t know. … As far as original content, I think any editor, and any publisher, wants to amp up original content as much as possible. Obviously here at TBD we have to make trade-offs because we do do a lot of aggregation.”
Brady has now walked away from two Washington-area news sites, but he said the issues at TBD weren’t analogous to what caused him to leave the Post. He resigned from the Post under amicable conditions, he said, rather than deal with the merger of the print and online operations, which were literally across the river from each other.
He also said this wasn’t an issue of legacy media bumping heads against digital media. When I asked if Allbritton could succeed in online news, he responded, “TBD is digitally forward enough … Time will tell in terms of the rest of the organization.”
And while he noted that he was practically inviting criticism by responding to another question about whether the issue was his leadership style, he said, “I hope if you asked around, not many people would tell you I’m a particularly hotheaded, angry, impulsive type.
“I just think these are changes you make based on the situation you have.”
Steve Buttry, director of community engagement, told my colleague Mallary Tenore that during a Friday afternoon meeting, TBD staff learned that “Jim is gone and that Erik [Wemple] is in charge now.”
Buttry said Wemple stressed to staffers that TBD’s mission would remain the same. “Part of our perch has always been that we’re always going to be unfolding and in process,” Buttry said. “I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some changes with a new leader, but I won’t pretend to know what that’s going to mean.”
Brady’s departure came as a surprise, said Buttry, who doesn’t know the specifics of why he left. “He and Robert had some differences and I don’t pretend to understand them so I won’t try to explain them,” he said. “We’re all surprised and sorry to see this happen but people move on.”
Mandy Jenkins, TBD’s social media producer, said staffers were told during Friday’s meeting that their roles wouldn’t change. Jenkins expressed relief that she and others still had job security.
“I was just really glad that they’re trying to keep the status quo, at least as much as there is a status quo at TBD,” she said. “We’re doing exactly what they want us to do, at least at our level.”
Considering how wired TBD’s staff is, it wasn’t surprising that they expressed their shock on Twitter. In response to my request on Twitter to explain what was going on, a couple responded that they foresaw drinks in their future.
Brady took a months-long road trip with his wife and his two beagles after leaving the Post and chronicled it on a blog entitled “Fred and Hank Mark America.” He said he and his wife have talked about starting their own business, or he may consult like he did between his Post and TBD gigs.
“When you leave a high-profile job,” he said, “you have no shortage of people asking you if you want to do horrible jobs like go do training in Hawaii.”
