Making It At The Post
Nocera, Joseph
Making It At The Washington Post by Joseph Nocera This is a story about The Washington Post, but it begins with a personal note. Before coming to The Washington Monthly, I was a daily reporter...
...Rather than treating it as just another dull, gray industry, Stern was p r o p o s i n g something r a d i c a l l y different: he wanted to examine the forces that made it work...
...Although, said one reporter, she has a problem knowing exactly what to do with the story once she’s got it...
...As a result much of his work went unread...
...That, and the unspoken feeling that a tour of duty in London will somehow make a reporter who has made a career of mining stories in the streets of Washington more worldly, more refined, or maybe just more comfortable at Kay Graham’s dinner parties...
...Others become e m b i t t e r e d and resentful, and as a result, there is both discord and deadwood on the Metro staff, two of the natural by-products of thwarted ambition...
...Kotz was a very good reporter, but most of the stories he did were overly long, cluttered with facts, and constrained by the need to be objective and nonanalytical...
...His main strategy for putting out a good newspaper is anchored in the belief that if you hire the best writers and reporters you can find, your paper will be better than the other guy’s because your talent is superior to his...
...the front page and how best to return there often...
...In its long-running dispute with the Post management, the newspaper guild, (the reporters’ union), has tried to make an issue out of a phrase management once used-“unmanageable free spirit...
...And at the Post, like most other papers, this system is full of constraints and limitations...
...Instead, they chose to leave him alone, to see what he could come up with by himself...
...A Foreign Country It’s a buyer’s market in journalism, and that is especially true at a prestige paper like The Washingron Post...
...When Downie first came to the Post, he went about establishing a reputation as a solid reporter who was not afraid to make investigative forays...
...There are other ways to catch the right eyes at the Post, of course: bright and lively writing is a valued commodity (one way, incidentally, the Post differs from its arch-rival, The New York Times, where flamboyant prose is deemphasized in favor of duller, but more fact-filled, sentences...
...Then the scandal faded, as they eventually all do, and Kessler and Babcock went on to other things...
...One of the first things new reporters notice about the Post, particularly if they have come from smaller papers, is the lack of camaraderie in the newsroom...
...That’s not what happened,” he said out loud to no one in particular...
...Although journalists at the Post are extremely bright people, there is that same belief that somehow they are qualified only to tell us the what of events and leave they whys to the “experts” they so dutifully quote...
...It is a good and demanding job, but one in which he simply does not have time to do much of his old reporting...
...So in May 1974 Stern came to the Post under the agreement that he would stay and write for six months and if it worked out he would stay on a lot longer...
...Putting in a stint on one of the Metro desks as an assistant editor can be an important stepping stone at the Post...
...In four days time, he was expected to leave quietly...
...All of us at the news service had the sense that we were doingsomething valuable-providing, at n o m i n a l f e e , n e w s t h a t s m a l l newspapers had no other way of getting...
...His stories also didn’t have any of the thought and analysis that could have told us the reasons, for example, why the FDA was allowing some dangerous additive on the market...
...Traditional beat reporting would need to be deemphasized somewhat...
...otherwise a front-page opportunity would be squandered...
...Harwood himself says, “A lot of what goes on here, having certain buildings covered all the time, is just done because it has always been done like that...
...at the Post a national staff position provides the same kind of incentive...
...Since it was also the kind of reporting the Post had rarely done before (nor, for that matter, had Stern), he would need consultation with his editors, he would need prodding, he would need ideas thrown back and forth...
...What was being taught...
...Then there’s the problem of access, since beat reporters need to keep open lines of communication to get at the news...
...For one thing, he doesn’t have a college degree, and it’s rare that a reporter will start at the Post anymore without one...
...The fact is, if the Metro staff reporters put their minds to it, they could tell us a lot more about what’s wrong with an agency like OSHA-by examining its impact on firms in the Post’s coverage areas-than all the dozens of Labor Department and Chamber of Commerce reports put toget her...
...For a political junkie-and Washington is full of them-that is good news...
...Never mind that as Metro editor Downie should have been a man of great power and prestige-he was, after all, running the single largest division of the paper-or that London had long ago ceased to be a city where important news was made regularly-the assignment was obviously a promotion for him...
...Harwood was right about this-it had reached the point where anything that had been in the Village Voicesix months ago was more than likely to show up as a story in the Post tomorrow...
...In 1976 the Posr had 162 reporters and 129 editors in its employ...
...The editors at one of our largest papers, one of the few that paid us a healthy fee, decided our brand of journalism was not exactly what they had in mind, so while keeping us, they also hired our competitor...
...You’ve got to love politics if you plan on going places at this paper,” says one Post Metro reporter...
...It wasn’t that the subject of banks was any less newsworthy-certainly there were dozens of important stories the Post could have written about banks-it was just, well, the smell of scandal wasn’t there anymore...
...In the same sort of way lawyers place the “legal process”above any abiding interest in right or wrong, seeing themselves purely as advocates, j o u r n a l i s t s see a need to stay uninvolved in the world around them, to never take sides...
...The bulk of the new reporters start on the Metro s t a f f , and the Post management encourages them to view Metro, which consists of the local news desks f o r suburban Virginia and Maryland and the D i s t r i c t of Columbia, as a means to an end rather than an end in itself-as a way of making enough of a splash to get promoted to the foreign or national desks...
...There is, first of all, pressure to produce stories in quantity, preferably a minimum of one story a day, and this takes its toll in quality...
...The emphasis was on the things newspapers have traditionally valued-on the scandalous (particularly of the smallf r y variety, like massage parlor exposes) or on what the mayor or city council did yesterday, and on brightly w r i t t e n f e a t u r e s , The i m p l i c i t understanding was that writing the stories Harwood wanted would have important career benefits, while bucking the tide could mean an assignment to the limbo ofthe obituary page...
...What was sorely lacking, say a number of former Times reporters, and what the citizens of Trenton came to resent greatly, was any sense of responsibility towards or kinship for the city of Trenton, or any feeling that the reporters were there to meet the needs of the city through the pages of the Times...
...Making It At The Washington Post by Joseph Nocera This is a story about The Washington Post, but it begins with a personal note...
...But above all, they would have to make judgments...
...And the people being covered know it...
...To show passion is to somehow be soft, and untough...
...That competition surely produces hustle and has a lot to do with the scandals the Post does break...
...On the national staff, this means that one reporter is given the responsibility of covering whatever news emanates from, say, the Justice Department...
...When he left, finally deciding that since he wanted to write magazine pieces, he would be happier doing them for magazines, the Post was not especially upset to see him go...
...Taking on a rival news service was a rather strong hint that we were in trouble with a paper we couldn’t afford to lose, but worse still, it became very clear very quickly that the editors liked the stories they were receiving from the other service...
...One by one, the various sections of the paper wouldn’t take his stuff anymore, and on the national desk, where he was assigned, he found his editors were often willing to sit on his stories, or kill them altogether...
...to find out how and why it was so powerful and financially successful...
...In his paean to investigative reporters, a book called The N e w M u c k r a k e r s , Downie describes Woodward’s modus operandi as a member of the Metro staff A Gritty Struggle Of all the reasons why the culture of the Post encourages the writing of certain stories, the most important is whether or not the story will have a chance of making the front page...
...More than Yesterday’s News Since there are not always scandals or hot political stories in the offing, the Post, like any other newspaper, relies on the “beat” system to keep its pages filled with news each day...
...Similarly, when another reporter, Ron Kessler, discovered three years ago that some of America’s largest banks had been put on a secret list of problem banks by the Comptroller of the Currency, the Post had a field day running bank stories...
...Certainly that’s important-a newspaper’s first priority is to give us that front-page news, to tell us what happened yesterday, fairly and accurately...
...In a d d i t i o n , beat r e p o r t i n g , especially on the Metro pages, can get awfully tiresome after awhile...
...Why were Washington’s teachers so uniformly mediocre...
...There isn’t any better indication of what the Post is missing than what was revealed in this story, published, ironicaiiy enough, in the Post itself, last October I . It began: “Americans aren’t nearly as angry at how much they have to pay in taxes as they are at how little they get in return, a national poll by Tvle Washington Post suggests . “The results indicate that the socalled ‘tax revolt’ across the country is aimed less at taxes than at the quality of government employee service, which most people perceive as poor...
...If you argued once about a story you were being aggressive, and that was all to the good...
...And it wouldn’t be as dull as those reports either...
...And in the end the stories on life insurance that were printed were flat and difficult to read...
...First, the people Harwood wanted on his staff were smart, aggressive, s e l f - c o n f i d e n t , and extremely ambitious...
...A few months ago, Post publisher Katharine Graham and her son, general manager Donald Graham, along with Bradlee and most of the reporters and editors who cover suburban Virginia, attended a session at a local hotel where they fielded questions from Virginia residents a b o u t t h e Post’s coverage...
...But it also engenders resentment, suspicion, and tension, and causes reporters, for example, to hold back on tips and information that might be helpful to colleagues...
...Since the general attitude of most everyone on the Post is that Metro is the bottom rung, reporters hope the right combination of talent and luck will allow them to impress enough editors for them to move upward...
...He was one of the very few at the Post willing to take on the Washington establishmentor to go after, for example, the companies that manufactured the Pill and the agency that regulated its use...
...Thus Bradlee and Harwood, who hire all sorts of wonderfully gifted writers and reporters, insist on separating good writing from good thinking...
...it hired 18 reporters and editors...
...Why weren’t kids learning...
...What Rosenfeld and Bradlee could have done was provide Stern with leadership and ideas, they could have created an atmosphere of ferment that would have turned his series into a smashing success...
...Reporters should be encouraged to take on the responsibility of making those judgments, based on what they have learned in the course of reporting, rather than simply giving us “on-theonehand-on-the-other-hand’’ quotes that come with objectivity...
...Daniel Flood, 1 worked hard to get a piece of that story, coming up with new angles or new twists so that the paper would use my version over that of The Neb, York Times, The Washingron Posf, The Washington Srar, the wire services, or my Competitor, who were all hot on the trail of Fiood...
...An important reason for this is that each reporter feels limited by what there is “out there” each day that the Post wants covered...
...A few years ago, it also would have helped if that smaller paper was The Trenton Times...
...Fine,” Bradlee said, and strolled back into his office...
...Since the Post is not a newspaper inclined to give its staff much counseling or guidance (even summer interns are expected to sink or swim on the basis of their own initiative), the process of doing well means figuring out how best to crack“Overlooked city government offices seemed a good source of stories [to Woodward...
...Because of his outside reputation, Mintz had virtual job security...
...If Carter took $1 million from a businessman dropped off by a chauffeur who was gay,” said this reporter, “Maxine would want to write a story headlined, ‘Carter Linked to Gay.’ ”) To do well at the Post, it’s good to have some of the qualities Bradlee sees in himself and likes to see in his reporters: a tough exterior, an almost brazen self-confidence, quick with a wisecrack or smart joke, and, most of all, a lack of passion...
...It was that they were tired of him...
...It was as if they wanted to be sure I wouldn’t be very happy doing what I was being hired to do...
...Finally, the Post gave Mintz the Supreme Court beat, one imagines as much to get him out of their hair as anything else...
...There was no discussion of how many other stories he had left to do...
...He was giving us important information, but it wasn’t written with any particular flair, didn’t have any of the things that would grab a Posr editor...
...He began his newspaper career in the late 1940s at Tvle Nashville Tennesseean, where he saw firsthand the evils of partisan reporting...
...Those who produced for their editors, who gave them page one copy, who stayed late after work to come up with scandals, were the team players...
...There aren’t many characters left at the Post, it hasn’t the inclination to handle them no matter what their talents-except for Maxine Cheshire, who is tolerated because every now and then she will land a big scandal, as she did with her Korean influencepeddling stories...
...They gave me the courts,” says one former reporter...
...Yet it is enormously important to everyone-a powerful industry that wields great economic clout and makes enormous sums of money...
...government directory,’ Woodward said, ‘and went through it department by department to see what they were d o i n g . ’ When a t e l e p h o n e call produced an interesting lead, he went out to see the bureaucrats and go through the records himself, often on his own time...
...since returning, Harwood has hired eight reporters from the Times...
...Although he had written four books, he wanted to go beyond what he had done-he wanted to study, in a series of articles, some institution that was important in America but had been unexamined in the press...
...He had been counting the column inches in the paper over the past few months devoted to the counter-culture, and by his count, the preponderance of stories were about, and portrayed favorably, the radicals...
...Competing successfully as a Metro editor means getting good stories-the scandals, the political fights-from your batch of reporters, and getting them on the front page...
...There is hardly a subject in the country more ripe for examination than the life insurance industry...
...In the nine months before Watergate, Downie writes, Woodward had more stories on the front page than all the other Metro reporters combined...
...The subject of banks dropped off the front page and back to the financial pages, where it was covered as it always had been-routinely...
...These were the war years and after, when a lot of the legends in American journalism, the Ed Murrows and James Restons, were making names for themselves...
...Because he has seen the abuse of biased reporting and it made such a strong impression on him, he measures the integrity of a newspaper by how little bias creeps into its news columns...
...The Team Player Syndrome The competition of the place notwithstanding, the culture of the Post also produces the team player syndrome, as strong at the newspaper as in any government bureaucracy...
...Telling people what’s wrong with OSHA means coming to a conclusion...
...There are a lot of American editors who remember London in the old days, when it was a city full of excitement and news for a young reporter, and when n i g h t s were o f t e n s p e n t pleasantly brushing up against British society at embassy parties...
...A few other examples of reporting the Post could be doing come to mind: A few years ago, Barbara Sizemore was the Superintendent of Schools in Washington, and the Board of Education was trying to fire her...
...Latching on to a hot local political race is another way to get ahead at the Post...
...1 had done the courts before, I could cover the courts blindfolded...
...The message was not that he should go beyond writing about indictments...
...Making a Splash For the reporters on the Times, The Washington Post was a tangible goal...
...Inside, it eventually got him a reputation as the biggest pain-in-theass on the paper...
...Woodward ignored most of what Wash i ng t o n ’s burea uc ra t s we re telling him except t h e i r leads about scandals...
...He wasn’t willing to encourage his reporters to discriminate between what was right about the counter-culture and what was wrong, what was frivolous and what would have lasting significance...
...The more stories editors can sell for the front page, the more they’ll be seen as doers, movers, developers of talent...
...He did...
...Richard Harwood is one who feels that way, for he, as much as anyone at the Post, worships at the altar of objectivity...
...There is not, at the Post, the kind of give and take between reporter and editor that would result in original, analytical reporting-stories full of ideas and conclusions...
...While they were right when they realized that so much of the Post’s indepth reporting is devoid of anything fresh, they were wrong when they concluded it can’t be done any other way...
...the subject didn’t fit comfortably into the Post’s daily news coverage...
...Why do we get all the new reporters...
...There is a fear that taking sides, having a sense of passion, will mean biased reporting...
...In this way, the Post took away from Mintz the chance to do the stories that made him special, while keeping him on the paper...
...On the Metro staff, there’s no percentage in becoming labeled as unmanageable...
...Too many reporters had become caught up in the excitement of the counter-culture, he said (this was in the early 1970s), and too many news stories were reflecting this...
...There is a deathly, almost irrational fear in journalism of analyzing and coming to conclusions...
...it wasn’t going to get on the front page...
...Our function [at the Tennesseean] was to elect to office the people the publisher wanted elected,” he has said...
...Soon enough they come to realize, as I did, that there are other forces, institutional forces, at play in the newsroom that define how they do their jobs and how successful they will be at the paper...
...Seldom could these stories be found in The Washington Post...
...They could tell us about welfare in ways much more meaningful than by covering the latest from Capitol Hill and HEW...
...The Post is always running some “enterprise reporting”-long stories or three-part series...
...One day, in a story meeting, Bradlee is supposed to have asked: “Who is this guy Woodward...
...In 1974, when Stern wanted to join the Post, he had already gained a reputation as a good investigative writer...
...Within a few minutes, managing editor Howard Simons was out of his office, telling Bernstein to put down the paddles and get rid of the net...
...That need can subtly influence the reporting...
...When his six months were coming to an end, Rosenfeld called Stern in and told him his time at the Post was up...
...The Post polling reporter, Barry Sussman, had put his finger on something pretty basic, but not often articulated, about the way Americans feel about their government...
...It is not a place for high spirits...
...They looked upon Trenton as if it were a giant playground and wrote about it as if it were a foreign country...
...As government and all the other giant institutions that rule our society have become larger, more complex, and more perplexing, newspapers have not kept pace...
...During my interview,” remembers one reporter, since departed from the Post, “they kept asking me things like, ‘Do you want to get on the national staff?’ and ‘Where do you want to be in five years?’ Obviously that was very important to them...
...Not everyone is treated that “well,” which brings us, finally, to the story of Philip Stern’s short-lived stint at the The Washington Post...
...Once when he was ombudsman, Harwood had a group of reporters and editors to his house one night and began complaining about the Post’s liberal image...
...It’s no surprise that that’s a common attitude among reporters in this city...
...At the Post, because this kind of problem-solving journalism is not defined as “news,” the tentative steps reporters do take in the direction of “in-depth” reporting are often dull...
...Yet the Post would have been performing a far more valuable function by explaining why government service was so poor, and where it was poor, instead of reporting the simpler fact that people thought it was poor...
...Woodward had flunked his first tryout at the Post, writing a handful of stories that were never printed, so on his second try, after he had been hired from the Montgomery County Sentinel, he wanted to make a quick impact...
...Because he is a passionate man who firmly believes in what he is doing, Mintz would become furious over his treatment, storming into the offices of his editors, demanding an explanation, and never, ever, coming out satisfied with their explanations...
...One question kept popping up: “Why,” Bradlee was asked, “do you keep sending interns to cover us...
...Put another way-and a number of Metro reporters put it precisely this way-no one who has ambitions at the Post wants to get a reputation as the next Morton Mintz...
...He was left alone to go after the stories he always wanted to do...
...It takes, in a word, salesmanship as much as it takes editing...
...it wasn’t going to help anyone’s career...
...The Post bought The Trenton Times in 1974 and soon thereafter sent Richard Harwood, who had been the Post’s national editor and ombudsman, to Trenton to edit it...
...Number eight on the list: “Be completely loyal to the newspaper, especially in private conversation with news sources, fellow staff members and other friends, never grousing or complaining...
...A reporter for a Maryland paper was sitting in the press room in the Maryland State House earlier this year reading a Post story about a State Supreme Court verdict that he had also covered...
...The experiment, it was decided, had been a failure...
...As a result, the kinds of stories I pursued changed dramatically...
...He had a list of them: stories about protests, about radical lifestyles, about priests leaving the priesthood...
...Sometimes it can mean precisely that...
...inside, he had the constant feeling of banging his head against the wall...
...There was an exhilarating feeling among the staff that they were on the Post’s farm team-Harwood encouraged that- ’ and they all wanted to hit home runs every time up...
...Outside the Post this gained Mintz a reputation as a fearsome and fearless reporter, practically a role model for journalism students, and it has brought him much-deserved acclaim and honors...
...And because these forces affect the way reporters think, and the stories they write-again, as they did to me-they have a great deal to do with what we read in the Posr each day...
...Reporters lost their incentive to write about them...
...0 Post reporters could also look at City Hall the way Woodward did not, by reporting what the bureaucrats did all day, whether their time was well spent or wasted, what city government departments were featherbedded and which ones were effective and how they could be improved...
...There have always been complaints around town from competing reporters that these Post stylists are not above twisting a few facts in the course of turning a neat phrase, but generally that is hard to prove and has the ungracious ring of sour grapes...
...In particular, we kept tabs on the local congressmen-what they were doing, how they were voting, what stands they were taking...
...big-time journalism isn’t like that anymore...
...Connecting Washington and Trenton What is missing most of all in the newsroom is any sense of shared mission...
...Their bad habits are those that allow them to bring in someone as talented as Philip Stern, and try something as unique as his experiment in journalism, and then waste both Stern and his idea through benign neglect...
...Around election time, virtually the entire national staff hits the campaign trail, reporting on races from all over the country...
...Mintz was not nearly as interested in political corruption as he was in federal agencies and corporations...
...We were described as an e x p e r i m e n t i n journalism, written up in Columbia Journalism Review, ‘and it all seemed terribly worthwhile...
...Suppose I was assigned to analyze the HEW budget,” says Harwood, “to find out where there was waste and how it could be cut...
...The story said the verdict had had a larger impact and had made a more sweeping judgment than was actually the case...
...If they have access to the top people, national beats usually provide more than enough breaking news every day to keep reporters very busy--and on the front page...
...There weren’t any “slots” for him, R o s e n f e l d s a i d . There was no discussion of the project, what had gone wrong, or why they didn’t like it...
...He was happy to be going, he had told friends at the Post, and no one attuned to the politics of the newsroom could miss the implications of the assignment...
...The editors would also have to value and encourage this non-frontpage journalism, and prestige would have to be attached as much to the analytical story on page eight as the scandal on page one...
...It has been said of Bradlee that no one in the newsroom has any idea if he believes in anything besides getting the story...
...The term was never defined, but reporters knew what it meant...
...My strategy worked, and even if the original purpose of the news service became obscured in the process, my by-line appeared as regularly on the front page as that of my competitor...
...The thrust of his basic complaint, that the Post was only interested in scandal when it was political in nature, was accurate enough, but no one was going to change that on Mintz’s say-so...
...I just wouldn’t feel qualvied to do that...
...Eventually, f o r beat r e p o r t e r s especially, the news starts to feel dull, stale, and repetitive...
...It was a story the Post was all over--a good political fight, with plenty of charges and countercharges, hearings and votes-and most of the coverage made the front page...
...The theory also is that deskwork, since it is not as glamorous as reporting, requires a sense of loyalty to the paper that reporting doesn’t, with its by-lines and immediate egogratification...
...It is therefore something foreign, if not repugnant, to the Post’s conception of good reporting...
...Their good habits are the reasons why the Post will give us yesterday’s news accurately and ferret out scandals...
...Not only are there no newspapers or magazines that have taken a tough l o o k a t t h e i n d u s t r y , b u t the government hasn’t done much eitherlife insurance comes under no federal regulations whatsoever...
...Not everyone, of course, makes it off Metro, and of those who don’t, some become resigned to it-accepting their fate, perhaps admitting they lack the ambition or drive or talent, or insisting that they really prefer to cover local news (and indeed, some of them do...
...None of these young reporters wanted to spend a lifetime in Trenton...
...There is no higher praise at the Post...
...Once you signed up, you were expected to be part of the teamHarwood had no time for whiners or complainers...
...When an editor once mentioned this to Donald Graham, troubled that the emphasis seemed to be more on people with law degrees or master’s degrees, who had less and less in common with the people they were supposed to be writing for, Graham smiled and replied: “Yes it is nice that these people want to work for us...
...He’s all over the paper...
...But this kind of reporting requires a journalism that is more subjectively a n a l y t i c a l t h a n t h e t r a d i t i o n a l newspaper ethic of objectivity has allowed...
...The theory is that no one should spend time behind the desk who hasn’t reported...
...There could be a sense of mission if the Post wanted reporting that tried to explain why things don’t work as well as they should...
...But there was a line you could cross, by complaining too loudly and too often, or by refusing to accept gracefully a final decision by your editors-after which you were labeled a pain-in-the-ass...
...Bradlee, according to several former Post editors, is bored to tears by his own Metro section, but has never been willing to do anything to change it...
...Writers and reporters are prodded and pushed at the Post, but it is to get them to be more clever with their prose, or come up with front page news, or else it’s in the “what-have-you-got-for-metoday” vein...
...There is a need, though, to be able to come up with a steady stream of stories about their beats...
...Instead, he didn’t talk to an editor for the next six months...
...Even the Post Metro editors are thrown into the competitive cauldron, where, much like their reporters, they must vie for a piece of the front page to prove their worth...
...But what was happening inside the schools...
...There are only a finite number of stories to be gathered in a day, only so much news “breaks...
...0 The concentration on beat reporting in the suburban counties means that Post reporters are missing a whole range of stories that could help explain how our government works...
...When Ben Bradlee first became editor, Mintz was one of those who felt especially freed by the new management style...
...By the mid 1970s, the Post was changing, becoming a less freewheeling paper than it had been, and Mintz began to find it increasingly difficult to get his stories in the paper...
...Carl Bernstein ,wouldn’t get an internship at the Post today were he to apply...
...Then a funny thing happened...
...Part of the problem was that his stories did take some effort to read after the fifth or sixth paragraph...
...This was precisely the kind of thoughtful, subjective reporting the Post lacked...
...In the beginning, they come to work flushed with enthusiasm, brimming with selfconfidence, and usually touched with some sense of journalistic idealism...
...Politics is still the bread and butter beat, and a coveted assignment on most newspapers, and the Post is obsessive about its political coverage...
...I went after anything that hinted of scandal, knowing this was what those editors wanted...
...Certainly this ought not be ignored, but it is often written about to the exclusion of everything else...
...When Nick Kotz, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, came to the Post in the early 1970’s the plan was for him to work entirely on longer stories...
...Our papers should be helping us sort it all out-telling us which government programs work and which don’t, where tax money is being spent wisely and where it is being wasted, how our instititutions are helping us and how they are hurting...
...The corollary is that the way to keep your staff motivated is not through the inherent excitement and interest in the news they are covering but through the internal competitions, those steps up the career ladder, that reward those that do well...
...When the roof began to fall in on Rep...
...The Post, in effect, was pointing out in this story the kind of news it was not giving its readers, although it was something readers obviously cared about...
...We’re creatures of habit,” says Harwood of the paper’s editors, and t h a t goes a long way towards explaining why the Post is run the way it is...
...But the news doesn’t have to be dull or stale, if only the Post would value a different kind of story, and if its reporters were encouraged to get beyond yesterday’s news...
...This was obvious from the “play” their stories were getting-mostly, they were on the front page or close to the frontand it wasn’t long before 1 wised up and entered the fray on their terms...
...Working for the Post is first and foremost a gritty struggle for front page play...
...He was, and is, a man with a genuine talent for finding gifted young reporters-and he has, on occasion, chased after young writers who have never spent a day in a newsroom because something told him that they could do good work for him...
...in the Bradlee regime, that is how success is measured and careers made...
...That attitude has turned out to be justified...
...pack” story 1 would have gone to great lengths to avoid previously, knowing full well that there wasn’t much fresh I could add to a subject that had the attention of so many other reporters...
...We stayed away from the Washington glamour beats, like the White House, and instead looked at how actions taken in Washington affected the local communities we wrote for...
...Since he was not producing the way beat reporters do, Harry Rosenfeld (who replaced Harwood as national editor when Harwood went to Trenton) ignored him most of the time...
...It’s unseemly...
...Nostalgia is one reason why London is more important on the career ladder at the Post than running the Metro section...
...According to people who worked for the Times then, sometimes they succeeded in this, while other times the journalism was condescending and mean...
...Consequently, Post r e a d e r s l e a r n e d l i t t l e of what Woodward had discovered about the inner workings of local government, although Woodward had himself a slew of exposes: illegally fatty meat being sold in grocery stores, restaurants failing health inspections, police officers illegally parking their private cars in a ghetto neighborhood...
...Before coming to The Washington Monthly, I was a daily reporter for a small, now defunet, Washington news bureau called Capitol Hill News Service, writing stories for a handful of Pennsylvania papers taht you've never heard of unless you live there...
...Second, most beats concentrate on what the top officials are saying or doing...
...Post reporters could find out for themselves whether there was welfare fraud and how widespread it was, whether there were people unjustly denied benefits, whether welfare really did keep ablebodied people from working, and they could help us figure out how to make the welfare system work better...
...To get this kind of reporting, of course, a lot of what it takes to make it at the Post would have to change...
...Bradlee, according to several people who have seen him in the daily news conference, brightens up when he hears about a good story on a political fight, offering suggestions and angles, something he rarely does otherwise...
...In this kind of atmosphere, it is hard not to resent the reporter who is doing better than you are and is getting a bigger share of the Post’s pie...
...rather, it is a newsroom full of responsible people working very hard for their $29,100 (the average Post salary...
...Except that I may have burned out faster than any reporter in history, there are similarities between my experience at Capitol Hill News Service and that of a lot of young reporters newly arrived at The Washington Post...
...In 1974, Downie passed around a memo to new reporters listing “things the city desk has every right to expect” from them...
...In this way, the Post is no different from any large institution or business, where the people who agree with and conform to the wishes of their higherups, who have the same set of values, will find that this is helpful in their own career climb...
...There were a number of follow-ups by Kessler and a rising Metro r e p o r t e r , C h a r l e s Babcock, who covered a series of congressional hearings on bank troubles...
...Unfortunately, Harwood’s past has blinded him to the rich possibilities of a more thoughtful, more subjective kind of journalism, even if it were to be properly labeled as such...
...1 sat down with a D.C...
...This kind of good, analytical reporting would mean getting beyond the surface, looking at what people do in real life situations, which is some of the richest material imaginable...
...Once, soon after the Post moved into its new building, Carl Bernstein brought in a ping-pong net and some paddles, strapped the net across one of the Post’s large new desks, and started playing ping-pong in the newsroom with another reporter...
...Not coincidentally, that is also a good way to go about a t t r a c t i n g t h e attention of Post editors...
...Mintz was a reporter’s reporter, for sure, but he was also constrained by that ideal-he was writing about things that often could have used more analysis and understanding than he could give them in his role as an objective newspaper reporter...
...They had the flaws of so much of the other Post attempts at enterprising reporting-too many facts and not enough analysis...
...Those who argued and fought for stories the editors killed, or who didn’t produce enough deadline copy, or who had a habit of not coming up with as good a story as the editor had sold in a story conference-these were the unmanageables...
...While the reporters present shuddered inwardly, the questioners brought up the name of Helen Dewar, a reporter who had covered suburban Virginia for about 15 years before being given the labor beat on the national staff...
...Gone forever are the days of The Front Page...
...it received more than 2,500 applications for editorial staff positions...
...1 wanted stories I could chase down in a day...
...Mintz was undoubtedly as scandal oriented as any hungry Metro reporter today, but he was going after a different kind of scandal...
...To become a reporter for the Post, it helps to be young (editor Ben Bradlee is a believer in the cliche that journalism is ayoung man’s game) and to have made a big splash at a smaller paper...
...It was like what 1 would imagine working for IBM is like,” says one former reporter...
...That wasn’t done at the Post...
...To do that, they have to know what kind of stories the editors are looking for and to provide them regularly...
...She was the kind of reporter they appreciated, one who knew the territory, who knew everyone’s name, who didn’t have to be given a refresher course on Virginia politics every time she wrote a story...
...On his first day on the job, there was a short stand-up meeting at his desk about his topic-Bradlee had wanted him to look into the stock exchange, but Stern thought that had already been done in a number of publications and proposed instead doing his series on life insurance...
...1 soon became obsessed, in a way I hadn’t been before, with getting my stories on the front page...
...When he did produce a story it often sat on Rosenfeld’s desk for eight or ten days, unread and unused...
...If the subject was OSHA, it would mean t a l k i n g to the businessman about his problems, but it would also mean figuring out how much of his “paperwork burden” was genuine and how much is rhetoric, which regulations were foolish and which ones the businessman complained about actuall‘y made sense...
...His solution was his instinctive one: to draw back, to cover other things, to forget about the counter-culture for awhile...
...There is a tremendous need in journalism for a reporting that does more than break scandals and tell us what officialdom did yesterday...
...and to get at the process by which it affects our lives...
...It is a reflection of the way the Post looks upon local news coverage that Leonard Downie, Jr., a talented reporter and editor, was recently reassigned from his position as Metro editor to London bureau chief...
...Again, these were stories that would have meant thinking about the counter-culture instead of mindlessly writing every story imaginable--it would have meant taking sides, but in a constructive, sensible way...
...Bernstein also would be considered today to be too flaky, too irresponsible...
...Loyalty is valued highly among the people who run the Post...
...From the corner of the room came the response: “That’s not what I wrote either,” said the Post reporter who had written the story...
...The combination of these internal forces creates what can be called the “cu1ture”ofthe Posr...
...Since they have already risen to the top, there is no frantic need to come up with scalps in order to get on the front page...
...The way The Trenton Times was run under Harwood has a lot of parallels at the Post...
...Rather than pushing to do it right, Bradlee and Harwood instinctively leaned the other wayback to more hard news, to the simpler stories that fit easily in the objective mold...
...By using Arlington and Prince George’s counties as barometers, reporters could discover whether a federal program was doing all the wonderful things some spokesman in Washington was attributing to it...
...It is a place to which many aspire and for which few are chosen...
...on the contrary, the sooner they could write their way out of there, the happier they would be...
...Since it was well known that Harwood would be back at the Post sooner or later, and that he would be one of the top editors (he is now the number three man, behind Bradlee and managing editor Howard Simons), the Times became a natural magnet for young reporters who wanted to make it to the Post but lacked experience...
...This is the kind of Joseph Noceru i.s uti ecliror ?/’The Washington Monthly...
...But that didn’t bother Downie...
...Now that Harwood has left Trenton, there is a feeling among Times reporters that fate has taken a cruel turn, but when he was there, the attitude was that the sky was the limit...
...While some of these stories are fresh and interesting, many more suffer under the constraints of objectivity, because instead of taking us from problem A to conclusion B, the stories simply link together more facts, more color, more background, more lively writing, but not more thought...
...The potential was certainly there...
...The newsroom gossips had it that London would be a final training ground for Downie, a chance to be a foreign correspondent in a sophisticated city before heading on to bigger and better things at the Post...
...on Metro, the beat might be D. C. City Hall or one of the suburban counties...
...It is something ambitious reporters must learn quickly and almost entirely on their own, and no one learned faster than Bob Woodward...
...The Post places a good deal of stock in stories exposing wrongdoing...
...We need to connect what happens in Washington to what happens in places like Fairfax County and Trenton...
...usually they are attracted to Washington in the first place because that is where so much of the national action is in journalism, not because they have a burning desire to cover a bus strike in Washington...
...He proposed the idea to his friend Ben Bradlee, who seemed excited, and later proposed it again to Simons and Harwood, neither of whom was nearly as excited though both were certainly willing to give it a try...
...I got the message...
...On the national staff, this is especially true...
...A lot of people with briefcases coming to work, doing their jobs, staying late, and going home at night...
...Until the Post’s editors are willing to do more than hire the best writers they can find, until they start providing the leadership and the thought and the sense of mission that is missing, we will never get the kind of thoughtful reporting the Post could give us, nor will it ever be the newspaper it is capable of being...
...Indeed, Post editors are so locked into believing that beat news on Metro has to be boring that they use it as a way to punish reporters from the national staff who are out of favor or whom the Post is trying to get rid of...
...It leads to almost an auctioneer atmosphere at the Post, which can make for a lot of overselling of stories, and playing stories of dubious value better than they deserve...
...His editors had taken some liberties to sell the story that hadn’t been justified by the facts...
...The clique of friends is small, and the atmosphere in the newsroom is quiet, subdued, businesslike...
Vol. 10 • January 1979 • No. 10
