By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 3, 2005; C01

The Washington Post is a bloated newspaper that should cut its voluminous and often dull output by a third to attract more readers, some say.

The Washington Post's rich offerings have attracted an incredibly loyal core of readers who would be alienated by a drastic personality change, others say.

The people who hold these divergent views all work for the capital's biggest paper, and they are firing away in daily in-house electronic critiques that have sparked an impassioned debate about The Post's future.

Business columnist Steven Pearlstein calls the critiques "almost revolutionary for this newsroom. It's allowing children into the adult conversation, and it turns out the children have thought about this and have some ideas, some of which [top editors] don't like and some of which they do."

Associate Editor Robert Kaiser says he was "quite skeptical in the beginning," but has been impressed that rank-and-file staffers "have the oomph to stand up and say what they think, which is often charmingly and radically at odds with what The Post is thinking."

But political reporter Dana Milbank is unimpressed, writing that with few exceptions, "this has been an elaborate exercise in navel gazing."

Who needs bloggers when your own employees are taking such shots?

Arguments about what readers want have become almost an obsession after an 18-year slide in national newspaper circulation and an economic squeeze that is prompting such giants as the New York Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer to cut newsroom jobs. Post daily circulation recently dropped 2.7 percent, to 752,000, from the previous year, down from a high of 839,000 in the early 1990s.

Some say readers have simply migrated to The Post's Web site (4.9 million unique visitors in August, according to Comscore Networks) and its free tabloid, the Express. But many staffers are using the forum to raise fundamental questions about the paper's mission.

The rhetoric heated up when Pearlstein wrote that Post staffers should "admit that a lot of what we do, and how we do it, is driven by a notion of good journalism that has more to do with 'dominating' a story and keeping up with the competition or, on occasion, winning prizes, than it does with what our readers need and want. . . . Too many of our stories . . . [have] 'obligation' written all over them."

Pearlstein called for a smaller, edgier paper and complained that the opinion pages have become "too tame, too predictable, too R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-L-E and, at times, downright boring."

Kaiser, while agreeing that some Post stories are too bureaucratic or duplicative, wrote that home subscribers have remained steadfast and "they love The Post. Do we want to change the paper in ways that might lose that loyalty in order to try to win the loyalty of people who in fact may never be inclined to buy an ink-on-paper newspaper? . . . I think the rich mixture that is The Post is perhaps our greatest single asset. Steve's proposal would undermine it profoundly."

Executive Editor Leonard Downie calls the critiques "a good dialogue" and says the paper has already been trimming the lengths of stories, trying to rein in overlapping pieces and using more graphics. He says Pearlstein "hasn't really thought through carefully" the impact of a one-third reduction, which would leave less room for advertising. "We want to be able to serve a lot of different kinds of readers with one newspaper. While people say the size of the newspaper bothers them, they all want to find what they want to read in the newspaper."

Dozens of staffers have participated in the critiques. Business reporter Sara Kehaulani Goo wrote: "Don't give me 4 stories on the same topic in one day because there's no way I'm going to read it all. (Exception: Hurricane Katrina). Okay, I'm taking on the Pope here, but we often have way too many stories here on the same official Washington news for one reader to absorb."

Style staffer Hank Stuever wrote that "we've overlistened to people who never read the paper. . . . Why are we obsessed with the paper being too much, too large?"

On Thursday, Book World Editor Marie Arana, noting that she had been "a Young Republican at 15, a marching SDSer at 20, and roundly disgusted by the blue-team, red-team political dialogue by the time I turned 30," criticized an article on what was called a "stealth evangelism" festival by saying: "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We're not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I've been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats."

Downie says he is concerned if some staffers are openly displaying political preferences but that Arana's comments were valuable and "made clear that we do have a diverse staff when it comes to ideological backgrounds."

The straight-shooting Associated Press is trying to reinvent itself with a pilot program called "asap," a print and online service aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds that has attracted 200 newspaper clients so far. The stories bristle with voice and attitude: a multimedia presentation on "Reggaeton, a hybrid of Spanish rap and reggae"; "Small, sleek and so, so sexy: An ode to the Corvette"; "Idiot in the Kitchen," the culinary misadventures of a writer married to a professional cook; and a look at a book by baseball star Jose Canseco's ex-wife that provides "vivid descriptions of his cheating, sexual preferences and even his -- yikes! -- private parts."

"People can graze for the most interesting stuff," says the service's chief, Ted Anthony, who at 37 is the unit's second-oldest staffer. "If we do well in focusing on this particular audience, we're going to end up appealing to a lot more people than that. . . . We're recognizing that stories are told in different ways."

Salon gets flak from its most loyal readers when it does anything that is perceived as less than liberal.

"If you are moving Salon to the right, then be prepared to lose a lot of subscribers," one wrote to Joan Walsh, who took over as editor of the San Francisco-based Web site in February. Another questioned whether "the neocons controlling all of the major media" have "now infected Salon as well."

Even on Salon's daily blog report, large numbers of readers click on the links to left-wing sites but most ignore the right-wing sites.

The question for Walsh is whether to edit the magazine for its 80,000 subscribers -- who pay $35 a year to view the site without first watching a half-minute or so of ads -- or 730,000 other monthly readers.

"There's really a robust conservative media," Walsh says in explaining why she runs fewer right-leaning writers. "The challenge is to find smart new voices on the liberal side. I don't think the world is crying out for me to find the next David Brooks," the conservative New York Times columnist.

The subscribers essentially saved Salon after a financial crisis in 2000 prompted founding editor David Talbot to appeal for donations. "David's most successful pitch was, 'Write us a check or I'll shoot this reporter,' " Walsh says. Salon roughly breaks even now, she says, but "the downside is we're not really a cause anymore."

Still, Salon is a shadow of its former self, with the dot-com-boom staff of 60 now down to 23, making each hire crucial. Walsh plans to beef up Washington coverage by adding a bureau chief to her two correspondents here. She says the former bureau chief, ex-Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, who left after 10 months, "brought a tenacious approach to our coverage." But he reinforced a perception of Salon as rigidly anti-Bush.

Salon also plans a daily video blog that will include television clips as well as original commentary.

Walsh defends such features as "Object Lust," "The Fix" gossip roundup and an advice column, but subscribers have been ripping them as "fluff" and "the dumbing down of Salon." Says Walsh: "My job requires trusting my values and my gut, not checking in with what could become a positive or negative focus group."