Having gotten out in January 2008 while the getting was good, I’m once again less than shocked by the latest news of chaotic madness at the Washington Times:
Washington Times executives are negotiating to sell the newspaper, after the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s family cut off most of the annual subsidy of about $35 million that has kept the Unification Church-backed paper afloat, company officials said. . . .
The negotiations follow months of turmoil at both the 28-year-old conservative daily and the business empire founded by Moon, 90, whose children are jostling for control over the church’s myriad enterprises, which range from fisheries to arms manufacturing. . . .
[T]he newspaper has hacked its newsroom staff by more than half, from 225 in 2002 down to about 70 people, raised the paper’s price and deliberately shrunk its circulation to cut costs, shed its metro and sports sections, and fired or pushed out several top executives, including its publisher earlier this week. Several reporters said most of the staffers are seeking to leave. . . .
“The feeling everyone feels is that it’s a totally rudderless ship,” said Julia Duin, the paper’s longtime religion reporter. “Nobody knows who’s running it. Is it the board of directors? We don’t know. . . .”
Ah, Julia! She used to sit right across from my desk. A patient and gentle lady, an excellent reporter on her beat, and quite likely soon to be unemployed, I fear.
Back in the day, when Wes Pruden was editor, some people in the newsroom used to complain constantly about Mr. Pruden’s old-school ways. With Mr. Pruden, however, at least there was never any doubt who was in charge. I turned in my two-week notice two days after Mr. Pruden announced his retirement. At the time, some people thought my decision to leave was crazy, but that decision proved far wiser than the decision of other people to stay. A lot of those people have since been fired or laid off, and those few who still remain are stuck, as Julia says, aboard a “rudderless ship.”
John Solomon, the new editor who was supposed to be the savior of the newspaper, turned out to be a two-faced lying crapweasel — er, sources say — and nowadays, people at the paper look back on the Pruden era as the “good old days.”
Too many people fail to appreciate that the news business is, after all, a business. And the problems at the Washington Times chiefly represent a failure of management, especially on the business side — circulation, advertising, marketing, etc. But some people don’t understand that. Some people never really understand anything.
“Bad craziness,” indeed.
