But rather than bellyaching from the high moral ground about the aggregators, why doesn’t Downie suggest media companies compete against them? They’re bigger. I hate copy-pinching as much as Downie does. That’s not a defense of copy-pinching, mind you it’s an observation.
Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Junior has written a new memoir of his nearly 50 years of guiding the Post through major news stories ranging from.
In the United Kingdom, the tradition of lifting with little or no attribution is almost a religion, and somehow quality journalism has survived. Video: 09-14-20: Latino Voters, Len Downie, Dolphins & Aging Watch Arizona Horizon Online PBS Video. There’s a long-if scurrilous-tradition in American journalism of stealing the other guy’s story and calling it your own. If readers can’t find concise summaries in their own newspapers, they’ll look elsewhere. is vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post and Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State Universitys Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Many would prefer a concise summary of the reporter’s findings. and Michael Schudson are the authors of 'The Reconstruction of American Journalism.' Leonard Downie Jr. What the Huffington Post’s success teaches the Washington Post-and what the Post refuses to learn-is that not every reader wants to read a 1,600-word report on the latest political scoop. Almost every Web startup or acquisition by the company has been, like the Post itself, a mid- or up-market venture ( Slate, The Root, Slate V, Foreign Policy,, , the late Big Money, the late LoudounExtra, the late Sprig, et al.). It will even tart up its Style section with a bubbly column called “ Celebritology.”īut going down-market on the Web with silly slide shows, celebrity news, and “titillating gossip and sex” (as Downie describes it) just doesn’t pass muster at the Washington Post Co.
LEN DOWNIE FREE
Its parent company will produce a free tabloid (the Express) if that’s what it takes to repel a competing free tabloid (the Washington Examiner). It will happily publish a comics section for children of all ages. Oh, a newspaper like the Washington Post will gladly publish a daily sports section filled with pandering, civically useless entertainment for the city’s sports fans. For some legacy media companies, aspects of what the Huffington Post, Gawker, Matt Drudge, and others do is just too low-rent, sensationalistic, and people-pleasing for them to imitate.