Reporters John Harris and Jim VandeHei leave Washington Post for political website

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Washington Post Reporters to Join Politics Web Site
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: November 21, 2006

The Washington Post, which has long prided itself on the depth and breadth of its coverage of national politics, lost two of its top political reporters yesterday to a fledgling multiplatform news organization, albeit one with deep pockets.

John Harris, The Post’s political editor, and Jim VandeHei, a national political reporter, said yesterday that they were leaving The Post to join Allbritton Communications to create an Internet-focused news organization, as yet unnamed, that will include a politics-only Web site. It will be affiliated with the company’s new newspaper in Washington, The Capitol Leader, which is to start print publication in January.

The departures were in the works before The Post, which like many other newspapers is experiencing a drop in circulation and advertising revenue, announced last week that it was making sweeping changes in its newsroom staff.

Mr. Harris, 43, will be editor in chief and Mr. VandeHei, 35, will be executive managing editor of the paper and of the overall venture, said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of Allbritton, which also owns local television and cable stations.

The two journalists are also forming a partnership with CBS News and plan to make regular appearances on morning and evening news programs and on “Face the Nation” on Sunday....

The departures disrupt plans at The Post to expand its political coverage and capitalize on an intense interest in politics with the Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill and the 2008 presidential campaign....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/business/media/21post.html?bl&ex=1164517200&en=24531ca1fa7314e1&ei=5087%0A

[LiviaOlivia]

1. Comedy Gold

Comedy Gold
By: Jane Hamsher
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/11/21/comedy-gold/
11-21-06

If you'd been sitting in Le Pan Quotidian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard yesterday afternoon you would have seen me pitch back in my chair and howl with laughter when Digby told me John WATB Harris and Jim "Pool Boy" VandeHei were leaving the WaPo to honcho a groovy new interactive news media site:

Harris and VandeHei note that their move is tied to a new vision of political reporting. It uses every medium on the web — text, video, and interactivity — to pull back the curtain on political stories and narrow the gap between reporters and their audience.

Tears…tears…oh lordy, it's just too funny…I can just hear the sales pitch for this future dinosaur (probably the same one they made for Hot Soup): "We'll tap the great untapped center, the people who are sick of partisan politics. Blogs are written for wacko political extremists, and nobody is speaking for the common man…the little guy in the middle…just ask Joe Lieberman. We'll own the internet."

Let's examine but a few of the major fallacies involved in this acute bit of thinking:

1) Those "centrists," the people who can be convinced to swing Democratic in one election and Republican in the next, who don't make up their minds until the night before an election or just run in the voting booth and pull all the top levers are probably not engaged in the political dialog to the point that they will want to "interact" with those who bring them their news. They might be stupid, apathetic or working three McJobs just to make ends meet but they're probably not going want to spend their leisure time shootin' the shit with VandeHei. People who are engaged political junkies tend to have strong opinions and they want to interact online with others who are like minded. If there were a great gaping demand for a moderate site, Joe Gandelman would be a rich man.

2) Jim VandeHei is noted for his unique ability to swallow large, undigested chunks of spin that make absolutely no sense and perform ungodly convolutions trying to pretend that they do (see: Luskin, Robert). It's going to be damn hard to "pull back the curtain" for the benefit of an audience if access to your source depends on an absolute unwillingness to turn around and let them know they sound like they're just churning bullshit. Harris, on the other hand, is just a complete toady to power. The temperamental alignment of the two with the DC elite and the subsequent journalistic contortions they have willingly performed in its service have done so very much to cause a crisis of confidence in traditional media and drive traffic to the blogs. I'll admit that their departure from the WaPo means the loss of 40% of my act, but this move to the "other side" is nothing if not dosed with supreme irony.

3) If there are two more prickly, thin-skinned journalists with absolutely no ability to accept the criticism of their "readers," I don't know offhand who they would be. To say that there is a train wreck in the offing as Harris and VandeHei strut forward to meet their adoring public would be putting it mildly.

Oh the pain…can't stop laughing…

~snip~

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Thanks for posting, Livia! nt

[Cha]

4. Hey, thanks..I read that the

other day on FDL but forgot about it until you posted it over here.

[Peace Patriot]

2. IT'S ABOUT TIME! I can't understand how journalists with any integrity at

all left in their bones could remain associated with that craprag.

And there are a number of other war profiteering corporate news monopolies that real journalists need to abandon. I hope to God this starts a trend--to put the SOBs who colluded on the Iraq War and on Stolen Election II out of business. WaPo. The NYT. AP. Time/Newsweek. ABC, NBC, CNN, Faux. Et al. Our country has been made sick unto death by these corporate news monopolies, and by the 5 billionaire CEOs who own them.

And I hope that John Harris and Jim VandeHei intend REAL journalism with their new venture. If so, I wish them well, indeed. In addition to restoring TRANSPARENT elections, nothing is more needed to correct the disastrous course that this country is headed in, than real journalism.

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Edit: After reading Comedy Gold's post, I realize I've given too much "benefit of the doubt" to Harris and VandeHei. More than likely, this is not a rebellion, but rather a well-funded and well-planned subversion of the work of the real journalists of the internet--an attempt to "cop" the energy and creativity of web journalism, and gain back "audience share" for the global corporate predator agenda (exploitation and slaughter of innocent people around the world). A person can still hope, though. I would love to see an exodus from these so-called news rooms of people who are fed up with corporate war monopoly news, and--whatever journalistic crimes they have committed--want to make amends and start doing an honest job.