The Washington Post and the Future of the Media

Fortune magazine has a profile of what the Washington Post is doing to evolve as a news organization. It's definitely worth a read.

Here are a few snippets that I think tell a lot about where we are in the evolution of the media in the Internet world:

• "Barry Svrluga, a 36-year-old baseball writer for The Washington Post, was on his way to the barber when an e-mail pinged his BlackBerry telling him that the Washington Nationals had sent two struggling pitchers to the minor leagues. Svrluga detoured to Starbucks, wrote a 572-word commentary on his laptop and posted it to his blog, Nationals Journal at washingtonpost.com. After his haircut he swung by the Post's newsroom to do a live question-and-answer session online with fans. That night, after filing a story for the newspaper, which he calls the "$0.35 edition" in his blog, Svrluga recorded a ten-minute podcast for the Web site, with sound bites from team officials and players. Like most reporters at the Post, Svrluga has become platform-agnostic, which is a nice way of saying that his bosses are no longer big believers in print."


• The problem facing [Donald] Graham [CEO of the Post] is easy to understand but hard to solve. The pillars of the Post, revenues from display and classified advertising, are declining faster than its Internet business is growing....advertisers paid about $573 million last year to reach readers of the company's newspapers, predominantly the 673,900 daily and 937,700 Sunday subscribers to the Post. Advertisers paid only about $103 million to reach the eight million unique visitors to the Post's Web sites each month.


• "No one," Graham says soberly, "can sit here and tell you how people are going to be getting news stories ten or 20 years from now." But people will want to know the scoop from the White House, the prospects for peace in the Middle East, and who's pitching for the Nationals, and someone will be there to tell them. We just don't know who that someone will be.

I love that last line, because that's 1/2 of what this blog is all about: "someone will be there to tell them. We just don't know who that someone will be." That's the "media," in whatever form. The other half of course, is "relations"-- as long as there is media, there will be media relations. We just don't know what form it will take.

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Bonus info for those into number-crunching: Dividing the print advertising revenue stated above by a weighted average daily circulation of the paper, you get advertising revenue per subscriber of $805 annually. If you then divide the Internet advertising revenue by the number of unique visitors, you get $12.87 annually. And that, folks, is why there is panic in the newspaper business.