Washington Post ‘stars’ meet secretly with newspaper president
Ten “big-name” Washington Post journalists — including Dana Priest, David Finkel and Carol Leonnig — secretly met last month with Post president Stephen Hills and expressed their concerns about what’s going on at the paper, reports Lucia Moses.
Steve Hills
Over sandwiches around the dining room table, the journalists expressed concern about the loss of newsroom resources. Accounts of the evening that are making the rounds suggest it was hardly comforting to their journalistic souls. Hills was said to have shocked [them] with remarks that awards “don’t matter,” urged more traffic-driving slideshows over original Post photos, and compared the Post to Ohio’s Dayton Daily News, a paper with one-fifth the circulation of the 508,000-circ Post.
Hills tells Moses that “I was having a wide-ranging informal conversation at a dinner party with my colleagues, who happen to be some of the best reporters and editors in the business, about the challenges that we face.”
Asked about this story, one of my Post sources said: “Steve Hills scares the hell out of the newsroom. Marcus [Brauchli] doesn’t get nearly enough credit for fighting him off.”
* Secret meeting has Washington Post buzzing (Adweek)
* From Friday: Washington Post ad revenue continues slide (Washington Post)
There was nothing secret about this meeting. It was an informal dinner I organized because Brad Graham, my former colleague on the Pentagon beat, is a long-time friend of Steve’s and we thought it would be fun to get some newroom folks together so we could get to know Steve better, and vis versa. Obviously we all have to pay more attention to the business side of The Post now, given the state of the newspaper industry. Marcus knew about it beforehand and wasn’t invited because he knows Steve well already. –Dana Priest
I’m just a civilian (not in the news biz) but VERY curious about the DDN comparison. Not sure whether to laugh or cry when I saw that.
OK, Dana. The fact of the meeting wasn’t secret. Was the discussion itself secret? What can you say about the creepy things Hills reportedly said about slideshows and whatnot?