Fishbowldc this morning takes a cue from the chattering classes at the Washington Post, with this item on rumors that there’s going to be a big announcement at the paper on Thursday. And just what could this huge announcement be about? The speculation, says Fishbowl, is that “it has something to do with Len Downie finally announcing that he’s leaving.”

Executive Editor Downie has declined to knock down rumors that his departure from the newspaper is in the planning stages. And so a fair amount of shop talk is to be expected.

Last night, Washington City Paper called Downie to ask about this big, huge, major announcement on Thursday. His response: “There’s no announcement coming on Thursday.”

Maybe Friday?

Deborah Heard, top editor of WaPo’s Style section, has decided to accept the paper’s early-retirement package. Here is a note she sent to her staff on Monday:

Good morning. I finally made a decision; yes, I’m taking the buyout. The money was just too tempting. So was the idea of a new adventure. (One of the first things I did during my vacation was renewing my passport!) I’ll be here until the end of the year so I’ll make the magical “rule of 80″ and can also help with a transition for the next person fortunate enough to have this amazing job.

The “rule of 80″ references one of the great aspects of the Post buyout plan. Here’s how it was explained in a Post Co. memo: “an employee whose age plus service totals 80 (after adding five years) can retire with 100% of his/her normal retirement benefit without having it reduced by early retirement factors.”

Absolutely no word yet on who might replace Heard.

In yesterday’s editorial praising the work of the Survivors Fund, a group built around the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, the paper let slip that the charity has been on the job “for more than seven years.”

More than seven years? Hmmm…So, “Loose Change” had it nailed all along?*

*Yes, this would fit better alongside the ravings of other nitpicky bored loonies in the Free for All column of Saturday’s Post…

With Erik Wemple mysteriously absent this week, staff writer Amanda Hess stands in as FF covers an array of hot-button media issues. This week: gnomes in Frederick County, the New York Times on sex, politics, and fetid water, and the Post on criminal psychology.

Let the wall-banging commence!

So it was indeed an earthquake that I lived through yesterday afternoon. According to the Washington Post, Annandale, the epicenter, “yawned” through the quake.

I can only speak for one block of Falls Church, where I was when the boom-shaka-laka hit. There was “Twilight Zone”-like weirdness when I went outside and saw other folks standing in their yards with “What do we do now?” looks, and dogs barked all over. I wasn’t yawning. Nobody was yawning.

‘Course, my neighborhood has produced a lotta sissies. But, tell the truth, fellow survivors: Did anybody yawn?

The Washington Post’s Style section may be saying goodbye to its top editor, Deborah Heard, who has plowed 20-plus years of service into the paper. She is weighing an early retirement package.

“I’m still evaluating it,” says Heard. “I have had a lot of conversations with a lot of people because this is a big decision for me.”

Like many of her ranking colleagues at the Post, Heard feels the pull: The buyouts are generous, full of free money, benefits, and parachutes, courtesy of the company’s deep pension holdings.

Less clear is whether Heard may be feeling a push as well. Her section is the subject of considerable intra-newsroom sniping, much of it a lamentation of how far Style has fallen over the years.

Her boss, too, apparently feels there’s a content issue or two within the hive of critics and feature writers. Earlier this year, Washington City Paper interviewed Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. about Style’s fraught relationship with washingtonpost.com, a platform whose managers have declined to give Style the presence and cohesion that the section enjoys in print. Downie steered the discussion away from Web considerations:
Read the rest of this entry »

*Good smackdown of Chelsea Clinton in Sunday’s Washington Post. The piece, by Postie Ian Shapira, asks whether the 28-year-old Chelsea represents the attitude and morays of her generation. Answer: No! She’s stiff, scared, and monotonic. Shapira asked Chelsea’s handlers to comment for the piece and got this response, which is absolutely classic: “This isn’t the time or place. This is the time to talk about her mother’s views.” Hate that. Just abhorrent.

*Longtime poverty reporter Alex Kotlowitz pens a long piece in the New York Times Magazine about the concept of a “violence interrupter,” a person who stops violence at its source. It’s a breakthrough of sorts that treats urban gang violence like a disease.

*Washington Times fronts an AP piece on the kerfuffle over HRC’s comment about how she’d “obliterate” Iran given the proper circumstances. Here, another AP story on how cancer survivors believe in humor.

*DCist lights up with comments on the most significant cultural event of the year in D.C.

*Hey, D.C. Education blog–thanks for catching up on the Excel Institute story.

As part of the fifth-anniversary celebration of the White House’s hanging of the “Mission Accomplished” banner, the Washington Post has re-posted an editorial about the event from May 4, 2003 headlined “An Unfinished Mission.”

This editorial sort of takes the administration to task for something. I think.

A clearer picture of the Post editorial board’s feelings for the president and his victory celebration back in the day, however, comes in a piece printed a week later than the one just reposted. In the second editorial, titled “Misfiring at Top Gun,” the paper attacked critics of the Mission Accomplished festivities for their “churlish and petty complaints.”

“[A] president who wins a war — whether you agreed with that war or not — pretty much gets to greet returning troops wherever he wants,” said the editorial.

And: “Their real gripe with Mr. Bush is that he looked great.”

Fab stuff. Perhaps ”Misfiring at Top Gun” will be reprinted next year on this date.

In any case: Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, who kept her job after botching descriptions of the Jack Abramoff scandal two years ago, devoted much of her latest column to somebody else whose ability to stay employed mystifies the locals: Redskins personnel guru Vinny Cerrato.

Seems Cerrato’s feelings were wounded by Skins blogger Jason La Canfora’s contest to come up with a “Cerrato-tinged nickname” for a fictional football team. Many of the entries focused not on Cerrato’s performance, but his Italian-ness.

From Howell’s piece:

Readers posted comments: variations of “Veni, vidi, vici” (”I came, I saw, I conquered”), leading to Vinny’s Conquerors, Vinny Vidi Vicis. Others included Vinny’s Valhalla/Valkyries/Vanguards, Cerrato’s Conquerors, Cerrato’s Cyclones, Vinnie’s Ninnies, Vinsanity and Vinny the Chin.

Cerrato explained his wounds to Howell: “To me, anytime you’re dealing with a person’s name and nationality and heritage, it’s not playful.”

And Cerrato’s hurt was backed up by John Salamone, the national executive director of the National Italian American Foundation, who said the ethnic nicknames ”reinforce a negative and harmful stereotype of Italian Americans”  and encourage “stereotypes that clearly were clear Mafia references.”

Well, I, too, devoted my last Cheap Seats column to Cerrato. While looking into Vinny’s pre-Redskins career, I found a little-known line in his resume: movie star.

Seems Cerrato, a few years removed from duties signing Christmas cards for Lou Holtz at Notre Dame (seriously!), was part of the cast of a 1993 feature film called “Kindergarten Ninja.” (Seriously!)

“Kindergarten Ninja” tells some sort of tale about drug gangs.

In his screen debut, Cerrato played a character called, ahem, “Antonelli.”

Luckily for Dan Snyder, the film bombed and ended Vinny’s movie career. And at some point since, Antonelli — er, Cerrato — developed an aversion to ethnic stereotyping. As he says, it’s just not “playful.”

Guess all those years of working for a team called the Redskins can change a guy…

Staffers for the national page of the Washington Post gathered Thursday morning for their first section-wide meeting since the removal of top national editor Susan Glasser. They came away shaking their heads: Characterizations from attendees ranged from “bizarre” to “Orwellian.”

Why so strange? Because the folks leading the meeting failed to address head-on the extraordinary events of recent days. On Monday, the Post dumped Glasser following a months-long probe into her management practices. She was reassigned to a job with corporate. The move capped off months of sniping and gossip in the national hive, much of it concerning the boss.

Managing Editor Phil Bennett kicked off Thursday’s meeting by talking a lot about change and innovation in the newsroom. He mentioned that a staff meeting was not the proper forum to discuss the recent Glasser trauma. (Hey, Mr. ME, what’s a better forum—an online chat?)

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who is now in charge of national, stressed the importance of communication on the staff and mentioned that his door is always open. Though he included a nod to Glasser’s innovations, he, too, was silent on the trauma of her time at the helm.

Bill Hamilton, the section’s No. 2, didn’t come any closer to addressing the elephant in the room.

“It was like nothing had happened and it was a routine planning session,” says a Postie who attended the session.

Then Post veteran and former top national editor Karen DeYoung spoke up. Though she wasn’t running the meeting, she did show some leadership. She noted that the staff was split on Glasser—some liked her contributions, others didn’t. Either way, DeYoung had apparently decided that those contributions merited some recognition, and she initiated a round of applause toward that end.

What followed was, in the testimony of four people in attendance, one of the most muted and awkward ovations in the history of journalistic morale-boosting.

The squirming, sidestepping, and half-hearted hand claps were an expression of deference to Glasser’s husband, Peter Baker, who was right there listening to it all. Baker is a ferocious defender of his wife’s work, and her fall from grace has not-so-oddly coincided with a series of talks between Baker and the New York Times. “It was like Susan was in the room because Peter was there, so that kind of stifled things,” says a source in attendance.

Other tidbits:

• Bennett said that the Post will move quickly to replace Glasser.
• Good news for competitors of the Post: The paper has reportedly overspent big time on its budget for political coverage, a topic that came up in the meeting. Chandrasekaran attributed the problem to the extended fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. Private scoffing ensued: Under Glasser, staffers were sent all over the political map with very little coordination. One of the running jokes among political reporters covering Iowa, for example, was that they’d show up at an event only to find two other Posties already on the scene.

From washingtonpost.com:

Correction

Thursday, April 24, 2008; Page A20 

DC Superior Court Judge Brook Hedge is a woman.

From: Susan Glasser [mailto:glassers@washpost.com]
Sent: Tue 4/22/2008 4:20 PM
To: NEWS - National
Subject: a note to the national staff

A year and a half ago, I was named AME for this section, and we set off together in pursuit of an amazing set of stories, from the earliest-starting, never-ending presidential primary camapign to the grinding war in Iraq in the twilight of the Bush era. It was a privilege and an honor to work with all of you on the tremendous coverage that ensued, all the more so because you have produced this courageous and innovative journalism at a time of great peril and handwringing over our business and our paper. And you’ve worked hard together to take on some of those challenges, whether by helping build a new political team for this most historic of elections, or making our reporting and analysis online in important new ways or by helping taking part in a major redesign of the A section and significant reorganization of an editing system that had gone largely unchanged since the waning of the transitor radio. I’m leaving to work on a new project with Don Graham but will continue to watch what happens here with great admiration and support. Many many thanks to all of you.

Susan

Several sources at the Washington Post are reporting that Susan Glasser, the top editor for national news at the paper, will be leaving her post. Glasser took over as assistant managing editor for national in late 2006 and started ginning up controversy from the very start. Underlings chafed at her sharp-elbowed, hard-driving ways, and top managers at washingtonpost.com also had difficulty collaborating with her.

This past winter, Tom Wilkinson, a senior editor at the paper, conducted a months-long inquiry into Glasser’s reign at national and found layers of dissatisfaction with her approach to motivating her people and deciding what to feature on the front page of the newspaper.

Yesterday Glasser was reportedly in and out of meetings with the paper’s two top officials, and this morning the newsroom is on fire with talk about her departure.

Details are still scarce. City Desk will be aggressively updating this story.

With Ruth secured in a hyper-secret, undisclosed location, Wemple gives the scoop on the Post’s ‘Outlook’ section, the National Journal’s website, Governing.com, and some family-friendly insight from the Washington Times. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…your inner wonk will start doing jumping jacks!

Sports! We all watch them. And what a weekend it was for Washington’s teams. The Caps, holding onto their postseason life, and the Wiz showing again that they’re not in the same league with the Cavs. Even though they are.

*Wizznuttz–whaddaya say about this series? C’mon, it’s playoff time, yet you fellows can’t give me a weekend update? C’mon!

*On Frozen Blog has a great meditation on the woes of Flyer Mike Knuble and the implications for the rest of the Caps series, in which the home squad is down 3-2 heading into a big game on Monday night and then–locals hope–Tuesday night.

*WaPo draws a powerful link between the local econ and one of the most environmentally devastating practice of modern times–mountaintop mining. The fundamental: Washington needs more and more power, and more and more of it is coming from coal. The coal has to come from somewhere, and it often comes from mountains whose buzzcuts make them look like “Mars,” in the characterization of an environmental activist.

*Recycling feat of the weekend: Examiner puts story on its site about how burglaries are up 21 percent in the District. Credits and links to WTOP. Go to WTOP, and find that WTOP links to and credits the Washington Post, which actually did the journalism.

*Columnist Mike Wise makes a good point about the Wiz–until and unless Abe Pollin’s team actually wins a series against this “rival,” there’s no rivalry. Just a one-sided relationship of sorts.

*Check this out on the Washington Times site: Ollie North executes hit piece on Jimmy Carter.