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Taking the Lede”

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Taking the Lede” The New York Times in Leadership Case Study: “Taking the Lede” Todd Murphy, Ph.D. Associate Director Center for Leadership Northwestern University Intro In some respects, Jeff Bezos and Katharine Weymouth might be considered peers: Born within two years of each other, Ivy League-educated, wealthy, powerful. Yet their differences are far more profound. She is the scion of a prominent East Coast family. He was born to a teenage mom in New Mexico, and later took the surname of his stepfather, a Cuban immigrant who adopted him. She was given the reins of one of the nation’s most recognized institutions, the fourth generation of her family to be in charge. He started an online bookstore in a garage. She was charged with preserving the legacy of the Washington Post, the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal. He is the master innovator of online commerce, the creator of Amazon.com, a retailing behemoth with seemingly limitless growth. So when their paths crossed, it was not the meeting of two contemporaries. Rather, it was a passing of the torch from one era to another. It now remains to be seen if Bezos can accomplish what Weymouth couldn’t: successfully lead the Washington Post into the digital age. The Steward of A Legacy The granddaughter and namesake of legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham, Weymouth grew up in a rarefied atmosphere. Raised in New York’s Upper East Side, she attended the exclusive Beardsley School and studied with the School of American Ballet. Thanks to her mother’s society connections and work as a reporter, she traveled extensively, dined at Club d’Alep, met the Syrian aristocracy, discussed fashion with Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and politics with left-wing British journalist Alexander Cockburn. When it came time to go to college, it was off to Harvard. Afterwards, she spent a year at Oxford studying literature, before finally landing at Stanford Law. Her first job after law school was at Williams & Connolly. One of their clients just happened to be the Washington Post. In 1996, the Post asked for temporary legal help and Weymouth volunteered. When the position became permanent, her career at the paper had begun. She later became the vice president in charge of advertising. And in 2008, her uncle, Donald E. Graham, who is chairman and CEO of the Washington Post company, named her the newspaper’s publisher. At the time, Graham dismissed any suggestions of nepotism: “What’s important is that the person who holds it is very capable.” “It’s great that Katharine’s in the family, but it’s even greater that she has shown she is very good. She’s been in highly relevant jobs, and she’s been great at them.” If her lineage did help her get the job, it also meant she would have to carry the heavy burden of the Post’s legacy. As Robert G. Kaiser, a Post associate editor who worked there for 50 years said: “She has a burden. Your biggest anxiety, as I know from personal experience with Kay (Katharine Graham) and Don (Donald Graham), is: ‘Am I going to screw this up? Am I the one who is going to be remembered as the goof-off who couldn’t keep it together?’ ” 1 Managing A Painful Tension When Weymouth took over, she faced a multi-layered challenge. Not only did she have to make sure the paper survived, it had to retain a cache and heritage that had been built over decades. This had to be done while also adapting to the new realities of the digital age. It was a critical time for the paper. The web had not only robbed them of paying readers, it had also (and more critically) siphoned away paying advertisers, the lifeblood of every newspaper. Compounding these factors was a severe economic downturn that further cut in to what remained. In assessing these circumstances, the new publisher was realistic about the challenge, but upbeat about the future. ““I’m very clear-eyed about the task ahead of us,” she said. “It’s going to be really hard. But I think that we’re well positioned. We have incredible penetration, a great newspaper, a great Web site and great people.” She had good reason to be optimistic. At the time, the Post was still one of the nation’s leading papers; its Web site had 8.5 million readers, third among newspaper sites, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The printed paper ranked seventh in weekday circulation, at 635,000 as of mid-2007, and fourth in Sunday circulation, at 894,000. Weymouth made her first move before she even had the job, telling her uncle she would not take the helm unless she could integrate the digital and print operations. A few years into her tenure, she commented, “Don was hellbent against it, and probably still is.” Shortly after taking over, she picked Marcus Brauchli, from the Wall Street Journal, as her new editor. He would be primarily responsible for doing the hard work of maintaining the standards of the paper as he confronted the harsh realities of the digital age. While understanding that one of the few advantages held by legacy media is that it is perceived to adhere to more rigorous standards, Brauchli refused to be held hostage to the past. “There are a lot of nostalgia- drenched people in the journalism field who look back at what newspapers were and have a fairly static view of what they should be,” he said in an interview. “Just because The Washington Post used to be a certain way doesn’t mean The Washington Post has to be that way in the future.” Consistent with this outlook, Brauchli set about instituting sweeping changes. As expected, Brauchli and Weymouth, integrated the print and digital sides in the first half of 2009. Journalists whose primary responsibilities were to the Web site now worked next to print reporters in The Post’s headquarters. The Post newsroom was reoriented to think about one primary goal: bringing the most visitors to Washingtonpost.com. They expanded their Web presence by trying to meld what was great about the old Post with new traffic-baiting tactics of online start-ups — creating new, high-minded blogs like Ezra Klein’s “Wonkblog,” along with “Celebritology 2.0” where news about the Kardashian sisters and Justin Bieber could be found. That led many inside the paper to wonder if online growth would come at too high a cost. Editors began to stress online metrics and freely borrowed from online competitors like Politico and The Huffington Post. Raju Narisetti, one of two managing editors 2 brought in by Mr. Brauchli, brought large flat-screen monitors into the newsroom that projected in real time what the most popular stories were online. He also installed a new internal publishing system that required reporters to identify Google-friendly key words and flag them before their stories could be edited. Additionally, there were now 35 different daily reports that tracked traffic to different parts of the Web site. Editors received a midday performance alert, telling them whether the site was on track to meet its traffic goals for the day. If it appeared that they might miss their goal, editors ordered up fresh content. Traffic wasn’t the only factor that editors examined when determining whether to kill or expand a blog. They would look at where online visitors were when they read the site. If their computers were registered with a government suffix — .gov, .mil, .senate or .house — editors knew they were reaching the readers they wanted. “That’s our influential audience,” Mr. Narisetti said. “If a blog is over all not doing that great but has a higher percentage of those, we say don’t worry about it.” To further emphasize this reorientation, Post employees were regularly schooled in the lingo of Web traffic. In memos to the staff, Mr. Brauchli was as likely to cite terms like page views, unique visitors and social media referrals as he was to laud a journalistic achievement. In February, 2012, Brauchli claimed, “Growing everywhere is a sign that we are adapting effectively to what our readers want,” and he had the numbers to back it up. Averaging 19.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, it was the second-most-visited American newspaper Web site, behind that of The New York Times. Even better news was that this was happening as the Post maintained its journalistic standing. Under Brauchli, the paper had won five Pulitzer prizes, and published articles like an investigation into the insurance giant AIG and its role in the economic collapse of 2008. Encouraging metrics and high journalistic standards seemed to indicate a successful online reorientation. Yet another side of the equation would have to be adjusted before the digital reinvention would be complete - downsizing. In an interview, Mr. Narisetti was asked if he believed that the newsroom would be the same size at the end of 2012. “One thing no editor in any newsroom in this country can avoid saying is that it will be smaller,” he said. The newsroom, once with more than 1,000 employees, now stood at less than 640 people, depleted by buyouts and staff defections. The newspaper’s Style section, once one of the most coveted assignments in American journalism, had shrunk from nearly 100 people to a quarter of that size. Bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago were gone. There were so many Friday afternoon cake-cutting send-offs for departing employees that editors had to coordinate them so they didn’t overlap.
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