Data-driven journalism

It's an oxymoron.

The new interim CEO/Publisher of The Washington Post, named after the paper fired more than 300 newsroom staffers, says from now on coverage will be “data driven.” Jeff D’Onofrio from his resume appears long on market ideology and short on news judgment. He apparently was rushed in to fill the yawning gap left by Publisher Will Lewis, who abruptly resigned after failing to appear on a Zoom call with the imperiled staff, opting instead to be walking the NFL “red carpet” prior to Super Bowl LX. He was outed by a photograph taken by a former WP photographer. Oh, the irony!

“They’re not reading your stuff,” he told reporters at his only face-to-face encounter with the newsroom when he came on board in 2024. But if click bait is the metric, why would management fire the entire climate news section, which is among the most popular. Or the entire staff of Sports, the Post’s golden section that has always attracted the most readers to the morning paper. Or foreign bureaus, from Kviv to Jerusalem to Cairo and Mumbai? Like nobody cares about Ukraine or the Middle East? What were they thinking? Reporters ar not widgets that AI can readily replace.

Sure, it’s important to “give readers what they want,” but does that require also abdicating news judgment, an old-fashioned concept that was formerly applied to determine which stories deserved to be front page (or home page) news and which weren’t. Have some publications pushed stories for their sensational value, click bait now, print sales previously? Of course. But that never was nor should be the only metric. Should we pander to the readers or shoulder some responsibility to uncover and inform them of “the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained,” as my namesake Eugene I. Meyer put it when he bought the paper at a 1933 bankruptcy sale.

Some people who don’t like a story used to accuse me (and by extension the newspaper) of publishing it only “to sell newspapers.” Well, yes, and no. Of course we wanted people to “read our stuff” but while still maintaining standards. Another phrase I often heard when I was working at the Washington Post , when I’d covered a story of widespread interest, was that it “has nothing but readers.” Of course the goal is to get readers, but also to pick and choose what’s important and what’s not.

Metrics alone cannot do that. Data-driven journalism? It’s truly an oxymoron.