You saw what Gene Weingarten posted on his chat site, right? I think he pretty much nailed it—starting with his excellent description of Manuel Roig-Franzia as a top-notch journalist and writer. On the surface there is something sorta old-school cool about a fistfight in the newsroom. It takes us back to The Front Page, to Breslin in his prime. Was it ever really like that? Who knows. What we can say for sure is, it ain’t like that no more.

But after inhaling deeply as the last whiff of a long-lost musk fades from the business, what I felt mostly was sad. Of all people to be drummed out of the Post newsroom. Henry Allen was the most dazzling and original talent I’ve seen in 30-plus years in the journalism business. His was one of the truly great Post careers, and he’s my ideal of Style at its best. When I try to unpack the reason I once dreamed of a place at The Post, it has to do with the sense of experimentation, of risk-taking, of form-busting that defined The Post in the glory days. People tried to capture the spark by saying that The Post was the ultimate writers’ newspaper. But what we were really getting at—even if we didn’t realize it—was that The Post was Henry Allen’s newspaper. He took newspaper journalism to places no one realized it could go, and thereby filled a lot of us with big ideas about what the business could be.

When I had my stint as an editor, one of the goals I set for myself was to force the Pulitzer Prize board to give the man his due. It was a scandal that the best newspaper feature writer, probably ever, was shut out year after year for the sin of pushing the envelope. I mean, it was such a cramped and crappy little envelope in so many respects, the industry should have cheered every time he ripped the fiber. I finally figured out that we needed to package Henry in a form that the board could understand, a form less challenging and less threatening, a form that did not loom like an indictment over the sorry mediocrity of so much of what we settle for as journalists. So for a couple of years we rebranded him as an art critic, on an accurate hunch that brain power and original spark could be tolerated in an art critic.

Anyway, I was sad because instead of being banned from the building, Henry should have a statue in the lobby—and yes, it should have prickles all over it and a grumpy look on its face.

Today I’m coming to a slightly different conclusion, as my sadness mellows into something more worthy of Henry. I’m thinking maybe this is a good thing. You know: not with a whimper but a bang. In these parlous times, how do you put the last exclamation point on a fearless career spent smashing limits and efforting the impossible? No damn sheet cake for Henry Southworth Allen, nossir. He’s left us with one more story that we’ll never forget.

None of it surprises. Ever since classified sales essentially absented themselves from the Washington Post, this type of haircut/retrenchment/gutting was inevitable. I really liked Book World, on those rare Sundays when I had time to read it. I don't miss Sunday Source but appreciate it for what it was: An effort by a well-funded newspaper to solve a demographic problem by, hey, just launching a new section. There'll be more casualties throughout the year. (See Washington City Paper's re-org plan)

The question is whether they'll bear any rational correlation to the hyped "strategy" memo released by Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth in December. That collection of gibberish cited a goal of "Being for, and about Washington," which translated into "addressing our local readers’ core needs."

Who knows whether closing Sunday Source, Book World, and cutting back on Appreciations meets anyone's needs. But as the Post manages its shrinkage, I feel it needs a better strategy, a better set of principles that'll push it beyond this cyclical-secular one-two punch. And so I've called around a bit in search of ideas. Among the most compelling is this bit of thinking by former Postie and current Time magazine editor-at-large David Von Drehle. In his own words:

The Post's problem isn't primarily a matter of focus or organization. It's that the business model is broken. The strategy that has guided The Post for decades is to create high-quality news and entertainment content that attracts mass audiences of people who care about Washington. Then you rent their eyeballs to advertisers.

That no longer works, for two simple reasons.

1. The most lucrative form of newspaper advertising, by far, is non-competitive, in terms of both price and utility, with its online alternative. Classified is both cheaper and better when digitized. So the backbone of newspaper advertising is gone and won't ever come back.

2. Audience is migrating to digital, where mass audiences are not as valuable to advertisers as mass audiences in newspapers used to be. The price-per-eyeball has dropped dramatically–in large part because advertisers can now use technology to discover how few readers in the mass audience actually click on their ads.

I think the survivors will be the outfits that figure out how to break their mass audiences down into niche audiences that a creative new generation of ad sales people will connect to advertisers in a targeted way. This will start to drive the price-per-eyeball up, which is the key to long-term growth.