Washington Post Chairman Says Newspapers’ Future Is Not in Paper
[Washington Buzz - Harry Jaffe]
National editor, The Washingtonian
Washington Post chairman Don Graham said publicly for the first time this week that the future of news is on the Internet, not in print newspapers like the Washington Post.
“The Web site simply has to come through, ours and that of other newspapers, for us to be successful,” Graham told investment analysts Wednesday in New York.
Graham delivered the keynote address for UBS Bank’s annual Global Media Conference. His speech focused on how the Internet is dramatically changing the way he runs his company.
“Our Web competitors, Google in particular, are coming up with clever new products which are designed to make our life harder,” Graham said. “Young readers are less inclined to read us than I would have guessed.”
After detailing the strengths that print journalism still holds—chief among them the effectiveness of print advertising—Graham acknowledged that the Internet can do some things better.
“The business is changing faster than I expected,” Graham said. As an example, he offered the Post’s coverage of Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
“This year for the first time I have come to believe that we will be able to tell you about certain subjects better on the Internet than we will be able to in print,” he said. “The Post newspapers have told you a tremendous amount about the guy. An editor named Fred Barbash . . . has started what I suppose you would call a blog called the ‘Campaign for the Supreme Court’ on washingtonpost.com, and Fred incorporates all of [the print edition’s] stories about Alito, but he also makes available all the opinions Alito has written, all those documents that he wrote back in the Reagan-era Justice Department.
“So if you want to know everything about Alito . . . you can literally learn everything that is on the public record. That is something a printed newspaper cannot do. Even though some people like to say we write at great length in the Washington Post, we don’t write at that great length.”
The Post got in on the online business more than a decade ago and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in it. It established Washington Post–Newsweek Interactive as a separate division. It created washingtonpost.com as its flagship Web publication. There were many wrong turns in the process, Graham said.
“The Post Company plunged in early, investing money in new Internet businesses to try to make things go our way. Some of this worked out; much did not.”
After hearing Graham and other media executives, UBS analysts had this to report:
“Several publishers focused on their online businesses as areas for potential growth. Many of the companies are investing incrementally, and we believe that the growth profile in these online properties is superior to that of traditional print publishing. However, we caveat this point by noting that online revenues still comprise only a small percentage of most publishers' businesses at this point.”
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