Fred Hiatt responds to Jeffrey Goldberg regarding the firing of Dan Froomkin:
The disappointingly dull truth is that the decision not to renew Dan’s contract–which was not made by me, but which I supported–was based on viewership data, budget constraints and judgments about how well the column was or was not adapting to a new era."
[S]how us the exact "viewership data" for Froomkin compared with, say, Kristol or Kagan or Gerson. Then compare Froomkin’s amazing daily output and diligence compared with their leisurely pace. When you realize he was just on contract, his firing is more outrageous. But anyway, Fred: give us those stats.
While it would be interesting to view Froomkin’s traffic statistics, you’d have to know what you were looking at and analyze them relative to the front page exposure given to Kristol, Kagan or Gerson.
Take a look at the Post’s Politics page. Do you see Dan Froomkin’s column listed anywhere? Nope. Nor is it listed on the front page. If you want to find his White House Watch, you better know where to look for it.
The Post has been trying to kill off Froomkin’s audience for a while. Anyone who writes for a web site knows that if you get no main page exposure — or in this case, even a link on the Politics page — your traffic is going to take a huge hit, regardless of the quality of your writing. It’s like taking a baseball bat to someone’s knees and then firing them because they can’t walk.
I’m willing to bet Dan did remarkably well in spite of that, as he continued to generate big outside links from Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler and others he actively engaged in regular discourse based on the merits of his work.
Hiatt doesn’t need to produce Froomkin’s traffic figures — he needs to explain why the Post has been actively trying to eradicate Froomkin’s readership such that disingenuous arguments about "viewership data" could ultimately be made to justify sacking him.
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Hiatt doesn’t need to do anything. It is clear that the WaPo made a fucked up decision here–to fire Froomkin, to not promote Froomkin, to perceive him as an enemy-within or simply to not recognize what he would be worth.
So, this is a new reason to shun the WaPo.
And their foollishness, and traffic/readership, will go elsewhere. Froomkin’s voice isn’t silenced.
I know/knew the pathway to get to Froomkin when he wasn’t linked on front page.
But you definitely have to digg to get to it.
I shouldn’t jump on the word “need” like that. You’re right–if Hiatt wants to try to make this right with readers by explaining, justifying what happened, he needs to do a lot more than reference traffic statistics.
I’m just mad at them. And was shooting from the hip. You rock, Jane.
WashPo is so arrogant that they don’t even realize they are throwing dirt on their own coffin. So extremely pathetic.
Hey, Fred Hiatt!! Why not give Froomkin a column in your dead tree edition? Because you are too stupid and scared. That is why. You coward!!
It would have been the logical step during the Bush years, given Froomkin’s popularity. He got front page links at that time due to the fact that the WPNI website was run by a different company, and they actually cared about traffic.
Fred Hiatt’s continued employment is based on the fact that Donald Graham loves him. Traffic is ultimately meaningless to him since Kaplan pays the bills, ergo Froomkin got sacked.
Not only is Fred lying to us about the reasons for Froomkin’s dismissal, he’s doing a crappy job, offering up Froomkin’s head instead of explaining concretely how he’s going to do a better job of driving traffic.
I’ve just pulled a graph of traffic comparing performance of NYTimes.com and HuffingtonPost.com to WashingtonPost.com — and WaPo’s entire site has been FLAT for more than two years, with the exception of predictable spikes for all three sites for key events like the election.
So how’s axing Froomkin going to change that flat traffic, Hiatt? Hell, hiding his blog didn’t make a dent in the overall performance of your outlet, so you can’t blame it on Froomkin.
Tell us it’s going to be more of the same dorks you’ve been offering besides Froomkin, Hiatt, and I’ll remind you that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting different results.
(BTW: NYTimes.com – 10.9M visits/month; HuffPo – 9.9M visits/month (domestic); WashingtonPost.com – 6.0M visits/month, roughly the same as January 2007.)
In the drop-down menu of columnists and bloggers, all were listed alphabetically except Froomkin whose blog-title was listed, thus placing him at or near the end (White House Briefing, then White House Watch when John Harris complained that readers were “confused”). The Post didn’t think they could get rid of Dan during the Bush years; his shining beacon was critical as an outpost of sanity. But now that he may have alienated some Obama-true-believers by continuing to shine the spotlight on torture-coverups, telecom-enabling, and secrecy-continuance, Hiatt & Co figured they could cut him loose.
My real questions now are: will we link to the Washington Post hereabouts and (second) where will Dan end up?
That would be a very interesting chart to see, Rayne. Would love to put it up.
… White House Briefing, then White House Watch …
That was accompanied by a change in feed location that caused at least one person to lose track of the column for a while. Boyish shenanigans.
Thanks Jane. I had noticed that they were trying to bury him. I shoulda pointed it out someplace before the firing.
You have it exactly right, as you did in your earlier coverage concerning Brady and Harris and Froomkin. After that campaign to delegitimize Froomkin’s reporting and opinions, the Post went underground, to lull its critics and to continue its campaign in a form familiar to anyone who’s ever been involved with or seen a co-worker fired.
In a routine employment circumstance, the syndrome is expressed this way. More detailed, all negative reviews, that typically compensate for a history of good performance and/or a complete lack of having documented performance, in an attempt to create the impression an employee being singled out for the works isn’t being singled out for the works.
Then come assignments culled from those no one wants. Next come the surprise reviews, comments, telephone calls to co-workers and past bosses, and putting out the word at the water cooler that “something’s wrong with Jim or Joan”. In short, the meticulous building of the file, socially and professionally isolating the target, and creating the expectation among the rank and file that Jim or Joan’s unwilling departure is only a matter of time.
In Dan’s case, the syndrome expressed itself in the way the Post changed the title of his blog, reduced its prominence, listed it finally in a catch-all group requiring no less than three clicks to get to – and often required signing, another onerous process. Compare that to the one or two click access to Krauthammer, et al. And, as you point out, the Post gave Dan virtually no front page, above the fold, headlines or teasers.
I also noticed that his column’s comments had a goodly supply of trolls, more than I noticed on other prominent blogs.
Harris, now at the Politico, tried to pull back from responsibility for Froomkin’s firing, which Glenzilla reported this morning. But he and others still at the Post, no doubt, enjoyed their vodka and champagne this week to celebrate their “mission accomplished” – a years-long campaign to hush one of the Post’s few commercially viable, credible journalists.
I’m glad you made this point. I had to bookmark him, bc I could never find him off of the WaPo home pages and would get frustrated.
Why are dead wood corporate newspapers dying a slow death? It is NOT because of the tubes of the ethernets. It is because the newspapers have become neo-conservative propaganda that serve AEI, Federalist Society, Bilderbergers, PNAC and all the Bushie Crime Family war profiteers. The true criminal power brokers are protected because they have purchased most papers and teevee and radio.
Fred Hiatt may as well be a Commissar of the old Soviet Union. He promotes corporate and lobbyist deceptions, the false flag mythologies. The real stories, Irak and Afghan genocide carried on by neo-cons, or the Shock Doctrine of Disaster Capitalists are ignored.
Mr. Hiatt, your newspaper may be quite fine for the kitty litter box, but no one will miss you when you are gone.
I have a solution.Do not link to any Wash.Post article in the future.If they want to be the voice of idiots in the land of wingnuttia I say let them go for it without us padding their bottom line.
Hi Jane. Hiya firepups.
The WaPo has been setting Dan up for a while. They changed the format of his column, made it VERY hard to find, took out the links to political cartoons (except occasionally), and in general, tried to make him look less popular. Looks like they succeeded. As for me, I’ve switched from reading the WaPo daily to reading the NYT as my on-line newspaper.
Note Genzilla’s column about John Harris. Apparently Harris doesn’t want to be any part of the Froomkin firing story. Pretty interesting.
Not only should we not link to that paper, we should not even name it. Why make it easy to find references to it that use its name? No, let’s call it “that paper that I will not name.”
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Dr Stephen Miles’ Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors hosted by Jeff Kaye
So the Likud lackies represent news rather than mere opinion? I’m confused.
Bribes-for-Access is a story which needs to be explored further. There are reports of promises made to perps for exclusive interviews to include soft handling and a book deal from the publishing wing. You can track the tone and content of Woodward White House books by the sagging poll numbers of the Head Simp in Charge; when they were up, Woodward was a bootlicker, and when down he was more critical.
And then there’s Larry King, who has always been able to attract everybody because he’s a bowl of mashed potatoes. It’s T-ball masquerading as MLB.
The Washington Post seems to be morphing into the Washington Times. What “new era” is he talking about?
Seems to me I found Froomkin via The LeftCoaster and tried to find it via the WaPo front page once or twice. Every time I need to hook back up to it, I just find it via blog links.
Sorry for delay, had to run off and shuttle kids around. I used Quantcast to pull the info, will email you the graphic.
Even using a Technorati comparison, WaPo only pulls a little over 1/3 of the blog cites that NYT pulls (394,315 to 1,043,551). Have to wonder what’s going on with the circulation of their dead tree edition…
(Oddly, HuffPo only pulled 285,925, but I think the challenge for HuffPo is that a considerable percentage of their content is available as cross-post at another outlet and the other outlet probably pulls the traffic. HuffPo’s Technorati numbers may reflect aggregation numbers — and right now, certainly doesn’t reflect accurately any changes in traffic due to Nico Pitney’s Iran coverage.)
In Pravda there is truth. What’s the other part again? For those that don’t remember this cold war reference, it is hilarious, as it now holds for the US media. They learned well from the CCCP.
The part that cracked me up was Hiatt’s line: “adapting to a new era.” How could he write that with a straight face? Yes, he can manipulate the numbers (about the number of Froomkin readers) but saying that Froomkin wasn’t adapting to a new era? And Kristol, Broder, etc. are? Too funny.
The Post is a joke. And has been for about 25 years.
I have to say that in years past the few times that I read the newspaper whose name cannot be spoken I always thought it sucked as compared to The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Not just a little, but a lot. Krauthammer has always been a distinguished lightweight, Kristol is a clown prince of the neocon journalism, and David Broder has for decades enjoyed a reputation inflated beyond recognition when compared to the paucity of his intellectual output. I’m sure the sports section is still good, and I know some of their columnists are good, but when have you ever come away saying to yourself that he or she really made me re-examine my assumptions and/or conclusions about this or that matter? When did you ever come away grateful for an especially telling insight on any matter?
The Washington Post has a decent sports section and they have a few columnists worth reading, but on the whole it isn’t a newspaper worth buying, and so in the long run Froomkin will be better off for this opportunity to find a newspaper or magazine, on-line or not, that is committed to something more than neoconservatism and mendacity in support of elected/appointed neoconservatives. That’s a losing proposition for the post-Bush-Cheney era.
Froomkin can bounce back from this misstep, but The Washington Post can’t. It’s a newspaper that has retreated to circle-the-wagons political journalism for the Obama era, and, quite frankly Fox does this better because I think political melodrama translates better on the tube.
There also was no obvious direct link back to the WaPo main site, after they started Froomkin’s initial exile into outer blogistan.
They wanted to get rid of him. They got rid of me and probably a whole lot of other people who’d go to Froomkin 1st, then check out other stories on the WaPo website.
No more — I junked those shortcuts a few days ago.
In Pravda (truth) there is no Izvestia (news). In Izvestia there is no Pravda.
The fact that they hid Froomkin is important. His readers had to seek him out, or were directed there from somebody who had learned something from what Froomkin had written recently.
Even if the WaPo comes up with numbers that show Froomkin got less traffic than Kristol, for instance, even those might not be honest numbers.
For a while, the main conservative web presence in Anchorage was called the Voice of the Times. It is gone now. But it carried people like Karauthammer and Kristol. A couple of my students, who worked for big oil-type offices, told me that they were supposed to click on the site several times a day, to pump up its numbers. Their bosses wouldn’t even read that crap, though. They’d have the “office girls” read it for them.
not only is it laughable that Hyass would claim that it is “viewrship data” that sank the USS Froomkin, but i am curious as to why these newspapers/online newspapers are so servile to the rethuglican party line.
it is beyond obvious that WashPoo has become a megaphone for rightwing sewage spewers, like Kristol.
something about the oblivious uniformity of the propaganda that emerges from Kristol’s every word leads me to think that he is a CIA plant.
i wonder how many such government-sponsored mouth-pieces and their apologists now permeate MSM.
you know, a modern-day operation mockingbird:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
check out this April 2009 video of Kristol in action, if you can stomach it. he is beyond repugnant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q_11_yw5-g
I remember when I first stumbled across Froomkin.
Probably was from a link posted here.
I thought “Wow — in one spot I can find thoughtful analysis of the day’s main issues with links to articles that agree or disagree with the position Dan takes.”
It immediately became my preferred reading material for the stationary bike at the Y.
On the days he was off or on vacation, I was lost trying to find all the material he routinely provided as one stop shopping.
I shed no tears for Dan; his talent is too immense to be squelched by the wrongheaded actions of such petty people at the Post.
In fact, I agree with the comments I have read in several places — that they have done him a huge favor with their stupid decision; he’s now totally free to pass on the truth as he sees it without risk of offending his former neocon sympathizing overlords.
My guess, and it is certainly only a guess, is that this guy’s firing had more to do with the panic at WAPO over its future as a daily paper facing the emergence of the internet age of journalism. Do we embrace the internet and blogging? NO! YES! NO! YES! NO!!!! And, the “NO!!!s” won yesterday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
Does Warren Buffet still own this stock? I think when you kill your money makers because you don’t agree with them that might effect stock price.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AWPO
$924 a share Jan 7, 2007 $342 a share sun June 2009 considering all the Right Wing writers they got and the one hidden Froomkin maybe they need to put Froomkin on the front page fire the Conservatives and replace them with Lefties.
Obama’s popularity is over 60% that is the market they want. The 20%er audience
1) Does not read
2) they are watching O’Reily, Glen Beck, Lou Dobbs they are listening to Rush, Savage, Malkin, Coulter just how many ways does the Post thinks conservatives can split that audience?
3) Just how much free time in a day does the average conservative have to watch, listen to all those choices never mind read a paper?
4) Moderates want to hear both sides with the one liberal gone I assume the Moderates will leave too now.
5)Conservatives during the Bush 8 years were wrong about everything the War, the Economy, No Child Left Behind, Iraq being connected to Ossama, torture etc. You don’t read the Post to hear the news you read it to reaffirm your belief against Reality.
As an aside, the comments on the ombudsman’s post re: Dan’s firing is now over 600 as of 7pm tonight.
What’s really funny is the following post regarding Kurtz has only 12.
And 8 of those comments are about Dan, too!
Donald Graham, Katharine’s son, succeeded her as publisher in 1979 and in the early 1990s became chief executive officer and chairman of the board, as well. He was succeeded in 2000 as publisher and CEO by Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr., with Graham remaining as chairman. In February 2008, Jones was named chairman of the newspaper, and Katharine Weymouth became publisher of The Washington Post and chief executive officer of Washington Post Media, a new unit that includes The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Post
It seems the drop in stock price happened not to soon after the son can in.
I started reading Dan Froomkin’s column daily back during the dark days of the Bush/Cheney administration, even bookmarking the WaPo web-site page carrying his White House Briefing link.
Then, his column tile disappeared from this on-line WaPo web-page, so I typed his name into the WaPo search field, and found Dan Froomkin’s column once again, buried, with the name changed to White House Watch, which I immediately bookmarked. Whew. I had thought that his excellent, truth-telling column was a goner.
The change in administrations didn’t change my daily perusal of Dan Froomkin’s column. Just like in the case of firedoglake, truth-telling is truth-telling, no matter who is in office.
I figure Mr. Froomkin will take a richly-deserved vacation for a short while and then either hook-up with a truth-telling, liberal-leaning, reality-based blog or web-site, or create his own stand-alone blog or web-site, continuing his excellent reporting, at which point I will bookmark this.
Dan Froomkin: high quality reporting with high quality links, and a true American patriot…unlike the WaPo conservative cretins who canned him.
It was amazing to me that Froomkin, for so long, spoke truth to power at an organization that kissed power’s ass. He got me through some bad Bush years and I’m sure he will land somewhere and I’m ready to bookmark.
The original joke was that there was no “pravda” (truth) in “Izvestia” (news) and no izvestia in Pravada. Izvestia was the other Soviet era newspaper.
Canning Froomkin wasn’t a mistake. It was strategy, albeit a very idiotic one. We in the blogosphere often think that those in the MSM dismiss us. Well they do but what we are beginning to see is how much they really, really dislike us. A lot of MSM types display a variety of emotions with regard to us like fear and disdain. But as deeply dishonest and corrupt as we may view the MSM to be, these guys are deeply invested in it. It is a system that has validated them and often made them rich and in certain circles well known. They are very attached to that system. Jon Meacham’s retro revamp of Newsweek and Froomkin’s firing I see as re-affirmations of traditional journalism, at least as this exists in the eyes of Fred Hiatt and Jon Meacham. They do not like us telling them that what they do is crap, even if it is crap. What we are seeing is the MSM at a crossroads where it can adapt to a changing paradigm or reject it. The WaPo and Newsweek have decided on rejection and to hold on to an imagined past. They are quite simply informational Luddites.
I wrote emails to Mr. Froomkin and Mr. Greenwald in April of last year concerning this very issue. My email to Mr. Froomkin:
From: Kelly
Sent: Thu 4/24/2008 5:02 PM
To: Dan Froomkin
Subject: Message via washingtonpost.com
Kelly sent the following message:
Dear Dan Froomkin:
I love your column. I read it frequently, and check every day for a new post. Previously, I would access online by going to the pulldown menu for “opinions” then “blogs”… Somehow they’ve changed the format so you are buried at the bottom of the page. WHAT IS UP? Please tell me who I should write to communicate my extreme displeasure. Or are you more prominently displayed on a different page?
And my email to GG:
On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:30 PM, kelly wrote:
Mr. Greenwald:
I read your column and Froomkin’s regularly (as well as Crooks and Liars). I greatly appreciate all your work; I have to believe that people like you and the rest of the progressive blogosphere can make a difference.
I’m concerned about the new placement of Mr. Froomkin’s column on the Washingtonpost homepage. All access to it is buried at the very bottom of a scroll down screen – previously he was featured prominently (above the fold as it were) on the Opinions page. It concerns me that The Post is devaluing an excellent writer, blogger, whatever you want to call him. Is this something you can drum up?
I’ve emailed the editors of the Washington Post, and Mr. Froomkin himself.
Thanks!
I believed reader surveys showed that 65 percent, an historic landslide, supported Krauthammer, while only 30 percent supported Froomkin. Do not question these internal poll surveys! Hiatt, the supreme leader, would never be unjust!
Late in the day but…, the WaPo has done Dan a favor. He can now go somewhere where he will get the support he deserves to have. The WaPo just has to hit the flush handle and say good-bye.
The “how much front page” time metric is a good way to look at all sites, and determine which authors they are promoting and not, by the way.
For those of you who–like me–have grown to require regular Froomkin fixes, Dan’s still Deputy Editor at Nieman Watchdog, where he posts regularly, if not daily. His pieces there are longer, provide more backstory, and analyze issues in greater depth because he doesn’t have to live with daily deadlines.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm
Take heart, pups, I’m sure Kurtz will reliably set the story straight and scold those WaPoofools first thing on Sunday morning. Yep. You betcha. Also.
What’s much more important than Froomkin? What’s on the WaPo front page right now:
When private investigators are asked to find evidence of a spouse’s infidelity, a good PI just says “Keep your money” as the cheated spouse already has a good idea what the answer is. Determining the vindictiveness or bogosity of Fred Hiatt’s excuses is largely irrelevant. Froomkin and his audience will soon find each other again.
Me too! Aalthough before I bookmarked him (and after they changed the location) I was able to find his column through the WaPo’s search function. Well, I won’t shun the WaPo, but I won’t be reading their columnists as much.
That Froomkin’s blog/column was buried by the WaPo has been obvious for a long time. Also, the supposed dispute about whether Froomkin was a “reporter” or an “opinion writer” is completely phony – why didn’t they just give him a column – is there a dispute about whether Krauthammer, Gerson et al are “reporters”?
Probably the WaPo kept Froomkin on as long as they did because it allowed them to say they publish a range of opinion. Eugene Robinson also serves the same purpose (of course the Post dare not fire him because of his recent Pulitzer), but he is syndicated so you don’t have to give the WaPo any hits to read him.
A couple of points. I read washingtonpost.com every day (or did before the Froomkin firing). A link to Froomkin’s column was frequently included on the front page in the box with links to that day’s op-ed pundits. In fact by 2007 his link was there almost every day (every day that he posted a column that is). Like many of you I read him every day and so did everyone else I knew.
Then during the long presidential campaign my interests changed. I was less interested in Bush and more interested in the primaries and the presidential race. I rarely read Froomkin during this period, and even for the first two months after the inauguration. During this time I hardly ever saw a link to Froomkin on the WaPo’s front page. Lately I have started reading him again and I started seeing the links to his column appear again on the front page (probably at Dan’s insistence).
Second point. In Hiatt’s explanation of Froomkin’s firing he says “…the decision not to renew Dan’s contract–which was not made by me, but which I supported…” Who DID make the decision? Dick Cheney? Seriously, who is Fred Hiatt taking orders from?
And who IS Fred Hiatt? I can find very little on a quick Internet search (compare his Wikipedia page to Froomkin’s BTW), but from what I can find his resume at the time he was chosen editor of the editorial page is much thinner than Froomkin’s is right now (however Hiatt has authored two children’s books which Froomkin evidently has not).
As for traffic to Froomkin’s site, be careful about comparing his traffic to traffic to Krauthammer’s and other RW columnists. If you’ve ever read the comments to Krauthammer’s, and others, columns you will recognize that a lot of liberals read their columns and then rip them apart in the comments section. Much of this traffic is pushed to those columns by liberal bloggers who highlight the idiocy found in the columns. I suspect much of the traffic to those columns comes from liberals and that traffic might push their numbers above the traffic to Froomkin’s column.
I have scrubbed the Post from my browser and will only rarely visit (for local news only). I will not link to it in my blog and I encourage everyone else to boycott it as well.
I’ll chime in, too. Back when I became aware of Froomkin, it was through links from bloggers. I had the same problem as other posters trying to find his column. For that reason, I didn’t have it bookmarked like many others I enjoy reading regularly, but almost exclusively looked at it only when others highlighted a post.
Partly laziness on my part, not bothering to track it down, but pretty telling on WaPo’s part, because I’m a heavy online news/commentary reader, exactly the person they should be making it easy for.
There’s really no other reason to go there, save for about 2 real reporters. I’ll just read their work indirectly, so I’m done with WaPo. Hiatt sucks. The editorial page super sucks. I won’t miss anything.
McClatchy is worlds better. So is TPM.
For those who might be confused by the last name, “Katerine Weymouth” is Katherine Graham’s daughter, sister to the numbskull Donald Graham. She and her lack of talent have also perched at Newsweek — a publication owned by WaPoo.
And yes, Buffett still owns a hunk of WaPoo stock. He generally maintains a “buy it; let management run it” style of investment. I’d sure hope this fiasco would prompt him to dump a bunch — if not all — of the stock. He has done that before, but it takes an atom bomb to get him to do so.
I think you are mixing the new publisher up with her mother (Lally Weymouth) is Kay Graham’s daughter and Donald’s sister. Katherine Weymouth, the new publisher, is Kay Graham’s granddaughter.
Fred Hiatt has no credibility left whatsoever. It is clear that he views his mission in life to promote conservative views takes precedence over any serious journalistic duties owed to his readers. This is something we have seen time and time again, most notably when his ombudsman mocked readers while defending error-filled writing.