Howard Kurtz is right, the latest Washington Post buyout includes the sort of names who should give one pause. Tom Ricks, the Iraq reporter who wrote Fiasco, is off to seek greener pastures. Robin Wright, an experienced Middle East reporter, is leaving, too. And so, notes Alyssa Rosenberg, is Stephen Barr, author of my beloved Federal Diary column. As someone who largely believes that the funding model of the newspapers won't prove adequate in the next era, and foundations and philanthropists will have to fill the breach, I'm not exactly surprised. There's a tendency, on the left, to talk about this in terms of quality, as if the problem were insufficient eyeballs. But the Post gets almost 9 million unique visitors a month. Their traffic online dwarfs their presence offline. The problem is that no one knows how to sufficiently monetize that traffic. I could argue that Tom Ricks should've been given a column, or at least the room to write his Iraq dispatches with the same ferocity and sharp analysis that marked his book, but imagine everyone could do that, and the paper's traffic jumped to 11 million unique visitors a month -- they'd probably still be in much the same hole. Newspapers have quality problems, to be sure, but they're fundamentally bedeviled by a business model built for an era of local monopolies, not global, online competition. Advertising is worth more per eyeball if you're the only way for Macy's to announce a sale. It's worth less if you're doing national image building. Long term, large papers like The Post and The Times will be fine. The shake-out will come a few rungs below, crushing midsize metropolitan dailies who have neither the barebones operating costs of a local paper nor the reach and revenue of a national one. Something will be lost, and though my guess is it'll be replaced, no one knows how quickly.
