“What’s it like being the new editor of DCist?” I asked Ben Freed one spring night when I met him at ChurchKey.

“I’ve been at it one hour,” he responded. “Check back with me tomorrow.”

It will take more than a day to assess how Freed does at the helm of the news website devoted to all things local in and around Washington, DC. But he knows where he wants to take it.

“It's an interesting time for local news,” he says. “The Washington Times seems to be packing it up. The Examiner is closing down its newspaper. It leaves a big hole to fill. Why shouldn't it be DCist?”

I had to ask whether he was daunted by the Washington Post’s battalion of local news and culture reporters.

As Freed explains, “I can’t go head to head with the Post. But if I see an angle the Post is missing, a fresh hook, I’ll take it. That’s what we’ve been doing. There’s a certain advantage to being small and scrappy.”

Since DCist, an arm of Gothamist, debuted in 2004, it has staked out solid ground in the capital city’s blogosphere. It serves up a daily dose of local news, from crime to politics to food and theater, and draws loyal readers who, Freed says, “want us to curate the city for them. It’s a tall order.”

Especially for Freed, a full-time reporting and writing staff of one. There's a whiff of the Wizard of Oz behind the DCist curtain. The 29-year-old Freed runs the blog from his Columbia Heights apartment. No news truck, no producer, no editor—not even an assistant on his first day as top dog. He gets around by bike—when he can. (It was in the shop when we talked.)

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Questions abound in today’s announcement that Allbritton Communications is planning to sell its TV stations and devote its resources to growing the Politico brand.

• Is Politico turning a profit?
• What are the television stations worth?
• How would Allbritton spend its cash in building Politico, its all-politics all-the-time digital publication?

Allbritton Communications is privately held, so it does not have to report more than it desires to make public. But as answers to these questions roll out over the next few days, here are a few things we can count on.

Robert Allbritton, 44, who sits atop the communications company, is steeped in the television business. His father, Joe, bought WJLA-TV in 1974 when he bought the Washington Star. He sold the paper but kept the station and expanded the company’s TV holdings. In 1993, a year after Robert graduated from Wesleyan University, he joined Allbritton Communications and jumped into the television business.

For the next few years, Allbritton learned TV from the bottom up. He sold ads, worked on programming, even did some on-air reporting. By 1996, the younger Allbritton was running the family’s communication company. He bought more TV stations, including one in Birmingham, Alabama, where he helped hire the anchor.

But in 2006, Allbritton shied away from expanding the company’s TV holdings. Given the opportunity to bid on nine stations put on the block by the New York Times Company, Allbritton declined to make an offer. A year later Allbritton hired John Harris and Jim VandeHei from the Washington Post and began publishing Politico.

As Politico’s Mike Allen mentioned in his daily column, Robert Allbritton has been contemplating the sale of the TV stations for six years. So its announcement was no great surprise inside Politico’s upper echelons.

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Al Jazeera America has hired veteran investigative journalist Ed Pound to run its investigative unit.

“It’s a great job, a great news organization,” Pound told The Washingtonian. “I think it’s gong to be a lot of fun.”

Pound is a great get for the startup cable network. Among investigative reporters in Washington, Pound is legendary. He’s worked as an investigative reporter for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and US News & World Report. He left National Journal in May 2009 for a job as director of communications with Recovery.gov, a website run by the federal government that tracks funds distributed through the Recovery Act.

Pound, 69, said he heard about the job of senior executive producer and approached Al Jazeera. “I knew it was a really great news organization,” he said. “I liked them. They liked me.”

Al Jazeera America is owned by Al Jazeera International, a network controlled by Qatar and run out of its capital, Doha. Al Jazeera purchased Current TV and is remaking the channel. It plans to beef up coverage of the Americas and have a strong presence in DC, based out of the headquarters it’s building downtown on New Hampshire Avenue.

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She the People, the Washington Post’s blog for women writers, has been shedding authors. Launched in January 2012 with 25 voices, it now features four.

It’s not quite “Me the People,” but it’s getting closer. This is sad news. When the blog was roaring along with a chorus of women writers—from Athens to Kansas City, London to Dallas—it was often newsy, amusing, and provocative.

Melinda Henneberger, who created the blog and still writes for and curates it, said in an e-mail: “Our budget hasn’t been cut; we shifted to more content from fewer contributors. We’ll see what happens, but instead of having a long list of theoretical contributors, I opted for truth in advertising and a core group of constant contributors.”

Before March 17 the blog featured dispatches from more than a dozen writers. Now it seems to be down to four: former New York Times reporter Henneberger, from Cambridge, where she’s a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Vanessa Williams, a longtime Post reporter and editor; Mary C. Curtis, a veteran journalist from Charlotte; and Diana Reese, a freelance writer in Kansas City.

Gone is Peg Tyre, author of books on education, who had some choice words for Sheryl Sandberg and her bestseller Lean In, about how women can be more successful.

“If you want to change things for young ambitious women,” Tyre wrote on March 9, “here’s a little advice from me: Forget trying to organize little consciousness-raising groups around the country for already stressed-out women. Instead, lobby your bosses to get another woman on your Facebook board, then make a public announcement that from now on, Facebook will only do business with companies in which 40 percent—even 30 percent—of their executive team is female.”

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In Rosiland Jordan’s first week covering the defense and diplomatic beat for Al Jazeera, she fielded frantic calls from editors: “You gotta get in here.”

News was breaking that US special forces had killed Osama bin Laden. Jordan raced to the bureau. A week later, the Pentagon unveiled video showing bin Laden clicking through stations on his TV. Al Jazeera news flashed on his screen. He sat back and settled in to watch.

“Why us?” Jordan said to her colleague.

The image of the most infamous terrorist cozying up to news from Al Jazeera fit neatly into the narrative that Al Jazeera—financed by Qatar and based in Doha—is an “anti-American” network, as Fox’s Bill O’Reilly would later describe it.

When Jordan signed on in February 2008, Al Jazeera was seen in few US households. It was streamed on the Internet, but only a few cable networks carried it. In January of this year, Al Jazeera bought Current TV from Al Gore, and in July it will debut on channels reaching 40 million US households. It’s adding reporters in the DC bureau and opening six bureaus in the US plus four more in Latin America, where it already has four.

“Finally,” Jordan says, “my sister and brothers will be able to see me in Houston.”

Washingtonians will see a news channel with a beefed-up presence and a more robust bureau. Al Jazeera is building a new facility at 1200 New Hampshire Avenue, Northwest, with three studios and three control rooms. The prime-time newscast will air from DC, initially from the Newseum, then from the new bureau, according to Bob Wheelock, who’s running the launch of the channel’s news operation.

Al Jazeera English covers international stories, while Al Jazeera America is the domestic-news service. The network’s Qatar ownership has given many the impression that its coverage is biased, including a congressman who asked the FCC to investigate.

“I would be naive to say that was not a problem in some places,” says Wheelock, who worked as a producer for ABC for 24 years before joining Al Jazeera last year. “But it’s far less of a problem.”

Jordan recalls protesters harassing Al Jazeera crews covering the 2008 presidential campaign. By 2012, the network had won a number of journalism awards and people wanted to be on its news feeds.

“People now know who we are,” she says. “They are more willing to talk to us.”

Jordan started her career in Boston radio in 1990 after graduating from Harvard and Columbia Journalism School. She worked in small TV markets before reporting for NBC’s Washington bureau from 2002 to 2006. Covering the diplomatic beat now, she’s on air a lot during the week, doing live shots and commentary. Patty Culhane covers the White House, Kimberly Halkett handles Congress, and Alan Fisher is the bureau’s senior correspondent. The network will add at least two more reporters.

“I know there’s going to be more work,” says Jordan, 46. “I could be on 24 hours a day.”

Wheelock says Al Jazeera will compete for eyeballs and ratings against all news organizations. But is a channel funded by an Arab government—which can finance new bureaus while US news operations are closing their bureaus—a fair competitor?

“Sure,” says Wheelock, who compares Al Jazeera to Britain’s BBC and China’s CCTV, both of which are financed by their governments. “It’s not just free money. It’s a business.”

And it’s hiring.

This article appears in the April 2013 issue of The Washingtonian.

The stock market didn’t seem too thrilled by the Washington Post’s announcement that it would start charging frequent users to view its website.

In midday trading, the Washington Post Company’s stock was down about two points. At .05 percent, that’s a pittance of a drop for a stock trading at $442 a share. Still, traders didn’t fall over one another to buy Post stock on the news it has finally decided to quit giving away its digital content for free.

“The impact should be relatively small,” says Liang Feng, a stock analyst with Morningstar who follows the Post Company. “The company has been losing money on its newspapers. If this can stop the cash flow loss, it would be positive.”

The Post’s digital and print publications represent one division in the Washington Post Company, which also owns the Kaplan for-profit education division as well as cable and TV stations.

“The company’s cable and TV broadcasting divisions are some of its most valuable,” Feng says.

That might help explain the rise in Post Company stock in the past year. From its low of $327 a share last May, the company has headed up and is reaching new highs for the past year. At its height the stock reached nearly $1,000 a share, in December 2004, before the recession and the advent of digital news drove down advertising and circulation. Federal regulation of Kaplan and other for-profit schools didn’t help.

Post Company chairman Donald Graham has been skeptical of charging digital readers, for fear it would cut into the number of viewers and depress advertising revenues. But Graham apparently has relented. The Post joins the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other media companies that charge for digital news.

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The days of a robust internal watchdog within the Washington Post are over.

That became clear when publisher Katharine Weymouth decided to not hire an ombudsman to replace Patrick Pexton, whose two-year term ended at the end of February. In choosing Doug Feaver Thursday as the first “reader representative,” Weymouth ensures that the ombudsman job is officially in the dustbin.

Not that Doug Feaver is a weak or inexperienced journalist. To the contrary, Feaver goes back decades within the Post, from reporter to editor to executive editor of the website. He knows the Post, its weaknesses, strengths, and foibles.

In choosing Feaver, Weymouth deflects criticism that she chose an insignificant journalist, but he will be toothless. His choice was greeted by huzzahs on Twitter from former colleagues. I suggest they check reports from newsroom sources: The reader representative is a part-time position, and Feaver has been instructed to avoid investigating Post journalism or the internal workings of the newsroom.

Feaver might have made a strong ombudsman, in the mold of Richard Harwood, the first Post ombudsman in the 1970s. Or Mike Getler, who’s now ombudsman for PBS. Or Pexton, who moved the ombudsman’s voice to Twitter and social media. In the role of a classic ombudsman, they represented the readers by taking comments, digging into the Post’s practice of journalism, and writing columns that explained how the Post worked.

But we, the reading public, will never get Feaver’s take on how the Post covered—or didn’t cover, or covered badly, or covered well—any particular event. Because under the new rules as the Post’s first “reader representative,” Feaver will neither write columns for the Post website nor the Sunday column in the Washington Post that readers have come to rely on and appreciate for more than three decades.

Unless Weymouth and the Post change the terms of his role and give him a voice.

When the Washington Post published breathless accounts in 2003 about Jessica Lynch’s battlefield wounds during the Iraq War and painted her as GI Jane taking bullets for her country, Michael Getler smelled a rat.

“The story was wrong,” he says. “You could tell it was off.”

Getler was the paper’s ombudsman at the time. He was also a respected Post lifer who had put in more than 25 years as reporter and editor. As ombudsman, he was the internal watchdog. When Lynch’s story unraveled, the Post was forced to run what Getler called an “incomplete correction.”

“That, too, was bullshit,” he says. Getler wrote a column that said as much, bringing angry authors to his door. “I had hired one. It was uncomfortable, but it comes with the turf.”

Ombudsmen—also known as public editors—operate on hostile turf: Their role is to represent consumers of news and to serve as internal critics within the news organization. They receive comments or complaints—from readers, listeners, and viewers at the rate of 200 to 300 e-mails a day—and they render judgment in columns.

“A certain amount of tension is inherent in the relationship,” says NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos.

The tension seems to be wearing on the Post. The paper might not replace ombudsman Patrick Pexton, whose two-year contract ends February 28. Word at the Post is that it will reorganize the position. Says Pexton: “It’s a bad harbinger for ombudsmen in general.”

Pexton used social media to serve as the readers’ advocate; his columns delved into the Post’s handling of four plagiarism cases, among other touchy topics. Top brass, in particular publisher Katharine Weymouth, might still be smarting over the way Pexton’s predecessor, Andrew Alexander, investigated the paper’s 2009 plan to hold “salons” at which lobbyists would pay to meet with reporters. He called the project “an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.”

Ombudsmen can stick their pen in the eye of the publisher because their contract guarantees them independence. Says Pexton: “I am unfettered.”

Now at PBS, Getler enjoys the same arrangement, so he can write that the network often errs by allowing corporations and friendly funders to finance programs in which they have financial stakes.

Take the 2010 TV series on former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, funded in part by corporations he’d worked for. The program “created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest,” Getler wrote. A recent Nova documentary on drones, funded by Lockheed Martin, was “handled poorly,” he said, and PBS “flunked” its internal standards by allowing Dow Chemical to be the sole corporate sponsor of last year’s America Revealed, a series about systems ranging from wind power to manufacturing.

Getler senses he’s an endangered species, noting that 14 ombudsmen have lost their jobs in the last few years. He laments the Post’s possible gutting of the position: “It’s an easy cut. You get rid of someone who can be a pain in the ass. But it’s a mistake.”

This article appears in the March 2013 issue of The Washingtonian.

With all due respect to the comfy but musty digs depicted in All the President’s Men, the Washington Post newsroom and the newspaper’s headquarters building are sitting on prime real estate that could fetch nearly $100 million, according to local brokers and developers.

“It makes sense to sell the headquarters,” says one developer. “The building is close to the end of its physical life, and it costs lots to operate. It also has great value.”

Since the Post announced last week it was putting its iconic HQ on the market, parlor games in the newsroom and among real estate pros have revolved around how much the property would fetch and where the Post might move.

The Post’s logo adorns 1150 15th Street, Northwest, where it once printed newspapers. Reporters, editors, and back office workers occupy the upper floors. Don Graham’s executive offices are on the top floor. But the name-brand building doesn’t encompass the Post’s downtown holdings.

The Washington Post’s property wraps around the corner of 15th and L Street streets and continues west on L Street toward 16th.

“That’s a big lot of ground,” says a commercial real estate broker. “It could be a class A trophy building if it’s developed in one piece.”

The District of Columbia assesses the 1150 15th Street headquarters at $72,863,300. If the Post can join that property with 1515 L Street and 1523 L Street, brokers estimate the value at more than $100 million.

“The Post figures it can operate more efficiently and reduce real estate costs once they move,” says a broker.

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Patrick Pexton might be the Washington Post’s last ombudsman. His two-year contract expires March 1, and the Post might not replace him with a full-time, full-throated, internal watchdog.

“We are in the process of thinking about whether we want to replace Pat with no changes in the role or do it differently,” editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote in an e-mail. “We have not made any decisions.”

If the Post decides to spike the ombudsman, it would extinguish a role that has been filled by distinguished journalists since 1970, when Richard Harwood became the paper’s first internal critic. And it would land a heavy blow to the position of news ombudsmen in general, an institution under siege.

“For the Washington Post to downsize, restructure or eliminate the ombudsman position makes it easier for others to do the same,” Pexton tells The Washingtonian. “There are not many left.”

It’s hard to get an exact count of ombudsmen in US news organizations. I count more than 20, including the public editor at the New York Times; ombudsmen at the Chicago Tribune, ESPN, and the Miami Herald, among others; and a standards editor at CNN and the Huffington Post. Many major news organizations are divesting ombudsmen. Revenues are scarce, so it’s not surprising publishers would see the position as a luxury.

“The Washington Post is a place where having an ombudsman is part of the culture,” says Michael Getler, a veteran Post reporter and editor who served as ombudsman from 2000 to 2005. He’s now ombudsman at PBS. “It sets the standard for what an ombudsman does.”

“I’m not sure an ombudsman focused as heavily as they have been on a weekly column makes sense any longer,” says Hiatt, whose editorial pages have hosted the Post’s ombudsmen for the past 43 years. “I think it is still important to have some way for readers/viewers to register complaints and/or ask questions and be assured of getting a response.

“Beyond that,” he adds, “I am still thinking and talking to people about what makes sense.”

In talking to Marty Baron, the Post’s new executive editor, Hiatt might not find a fan.

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