Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another Washington Post Edition)

Jonathan Schwartz writes:

A Tiny Revolution: Washington Post's Outstanding News Judgment Comes Through For Us Again!: The Washington Post today ran a story about the new Johns Hopkins study estimating excess deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion at 655,000. It was on page A12.

Now, whiny malcontents who don't understand the news business might wonder why this doesn't merit screaming headlines on the front page. But what these whiny malcontents don't get is that Page One real estate is precious. You can't run just any old story there. You have to give the highest priority to what really matters, what the policymakers and just regular citizens in Washington HAVE to know about.

For instance:

The Handwriting Is on the Wall: Researchers See a Downside as Keyboards Replace Pens in School

Story online here. I particularly appreciate the cursive headline. Let no one say there's a shortage of ingenuity at the Washington Post when it comes to presenting the critical news of the day!

I give them less than ten years. I cannot imagine why anybody who thinks about it pays for the Post today.

Comments

[d'Nile]

Job one in the modern media: don't piss off the people in power.

Everything else flows from that.

[wapocritic]

The ads. I take the fishwrap version because of the Sunday inserts.
And Froomkin (oops, Froomkin's only in the electronic version).

[Matt McIrvin]

The handwringing "Penmanship On Decline" article is one of those stories that comes around on a periodic cycle, along with "Young Republicans Shed Stuffy Image" and "More Scientists Turning to God".

[anne]

What matters is that we continue to urge leaving Iraq immediately.

[Dave L]

The comics. The best [three!] funny pages in the business. The New York Times could take a hint...

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

What was the Post's editorial position on invading Iraq? What do they think we should do today?

[crocop]

Brad, did you see the article on Phelps that Mankiw linked to yesterday?

Here it is, in all its glory:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/09/AR2006100900219.html

[Jim Hart]

You are exactly right, Brad. I cancelled my Post subscription a year and a half ago. I don't miss it a bit.

[jfaberuiuc]

Speaking of the Post, care to get shrill on David Broder, whose measlymouthed quasi-shrillness about Congress in this morning's column basically contradicts the one from last week praising DeWine, Chafee, and the rest? Apparently, we should vote the bums out, because that's the will of the voters and a sign of bipartisanship to come, unless he like the bums, in which case it's a sign of reckless partisanship and bad for the country...or some crap like that.

[RT]

I keep subscribing because the parts that are good are still worth the subscription price, no matter how wretched Broder, Will, Hiatt, Robert J. not-Paul Samuelson, Richard Cohen, Novakula, and all the rest of the clowns that write their editorials and op-eds are, and no matter where they bury the better stories in the A-section. I start off by flipping through the A-section and seeing what's inside before I decide what to read first.

Besides, I like a dead-trees paper with my morning coffee, and it's either this or the Baltimore Sun.

[RT]

And Dave L, their comics section is pretty good, but only because they have so much of it. 60% of it (26 strips out of 43) is crap. And that's including the rather predictable "Sally Forth," the GOP-talking-points-spouting "Prickly City," and the briefly brilliant but now increasingly tiresome "Get Fuzzy" amongst the readable ones.