They aren't? Well, they used to be! Great work, Marcus Brauchli! In just one year you've turned the Washington Post into a local paper. Ben Bradlee must be so proud.
How sad it is that he utterly misses the point of the service local bureaus render: that they provide another take, another perspective, another voice on events of national consequence on their regional beats, and because they know the paper's home audience, they can best explain why those regional events matter to the home audience. With decisions like this, newspapers ingest more and more of their suicidal poison.
@TheBusinessGuy: There's ***maybe*** an argument toward focusing resources locally and in depth, instead of adding the showing baubles of thinly staffed regional buros that add a 30k feet national perspective to what's going on at the local level and, in theory, could be pretty much plugged in via wire. If wire didn't totally suck.
@If_I_Had_a_Poodle: True, but I would cut back on soft news resources--style sections and the like--before I would cut back on news. Of course, the soft news drives circ, so...Oh, hell, I can't solve this, either.
@TheBusinessGuy: you make the mistake of believing that the WaPo is interested in these other localities. I'm not that old, but during the time I considered myself an avid reader, it's has transformed rather convincingly into "a beltway paper." I think for a long time it was trying to compete on the same level as the NYT but it is firmly entrenched in the Insidery/Village of DC. And now that the Times is pretty much kaput, it really doesn't have to try that hard. Sadness.
@TheBusinessGuy: You would think that such a national perspective would be all the more important for the Post, given how its home audience is so heavily salted with readers whose decisions have such a profound effect on the life of the nation.
@If_I_Had_a_Poodle: Fair enough. As i see it, the business of government has largely become a rich man's game, geared towards their interests more than society's in general. And if the Post has narrowed its scope to match the likewise narrowed goals of the government, I'd say that's a pretty sad fucking thing.
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