Postwatchers: The Future Talks With The Past

Via Amy Ridenour, Harry Jaffe at Washingtonian magazine's online Buzz has a testy email exchange between an unidentified Washington Post editor and Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com's executive editor (he participated in a live chat last week). Here's Jaffe's column and here are the emails. Basically the editor feels like the newsroom is out of the loop, since the website presents a different face to the world--and different by the minute--than the paper (Brady takes strong exception). The word "cannibalization" is also used--giving away for free on the website what people have to pay for in the newspaper, an issue anyone trying to leverage print into the online world has to wrestle with, as I know from personal experience at McGraw-Hill.

But as Jaffe points out:

Rather than being a techie sideshow that drains resources, Washingtonpost.com could become a profit center that helps support the newspaper’s 3,000 employees. The Post Company talks about doubling or tripling its online revenues.

That doesn't mean they're generating net profits--yet. But the scale of the operation is impressive. After criticizing washingtonpost.com's story play, Mystery Editor writes the following in the email:

Well, a person could argue, the web audience isn’t as big or as important as the newspaper audience. Hmmm. I recently heard that on Sept. 13 for example, we had 9,099,538 page views on the web site, which translate into 1,532,013 unique users.

My traffic? Less. He continues:

Same day we had 800,000 people who paid to be unique users of the print paper. We now have 2.1 million unique subsrcibers to our online newsletter. I’m an English major, granted, but that math suggests to me that a majority of our readers may be using the web rather than the paper. A majority!

Yes! That means you have a future!

Update: Look, it's not like free editorial content can't make money. From Howard Kurtz in the Style section today on the merger of alternative media companies New Times and The Village Voice:

Despite their liberal, anti-establishment pedigree, alternative weeklies such as New Times and Village Voice long ago became big business. They are free and stuffed with music and arts coverage, they rake in piles of cash from entertainment ads and personal classifieds. Village Voice Media is owned by a consortium of investment banks that beat out New Times five years ago.