Have you heard the one about the fake 140-year-old hot dog?

How Batman kicked Superman's ass? ("Holy ass-kicking, Batman!")

How pot dealers prefer FedEx to UPS ("I mean, if you absolutely, positively have to get stoned overnight, I guess it's the way to go," says the Post's Petula Dvorak) but the USPS over both?

Actually, the story behind that last item is worth a closer look.

According to Politico, Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who works for the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (responsibility? ethics?), was cooking dinner and watching her 11-month-old on Monday night when a FedEx guy showed up at the door with a package. It looked weird. It had only her Capitol Hill address on it, not her name, and it came from a mailing center in Anaheim, Calif.

She and her husband weren't expecting anything, but what the heck, who doesn't love an unexpected package? They set about opening it. It took 10 minutes, which was probably the first clue it wasn't a handmade knit hat for the baby.

Sloan and her husband cut through layers of insulation normally used in ceilings – which led them to believe there was an explosive inside. But the next level was a “huge oval wrapped in a zillion layers of plastic wrap.” It was then they smelled coffee, which is often used to cover the scent of drugs. And as a former Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia, Sloan knew what was inside.

When she called the police, 12 showed up at her door. And they shot a series of photos of the huge block of pot. “They’re used to seeing dime bags,” Sloan joked.

One more thing: It has been reported to me by a top secret source that the print-edition City Papers were missing from their normal spot in the Rosslyn Metro station yesterday. Did you see them, Jim Brady?

What's the name going to be?

No word on that just yet. PostKiller.com, after all, is just a joke. And this thing threatens us and the Examiner and everyone else in this market as much as it does the Post.

When will it launch?

Spring 2010 is the best guess of Jim Brady, who will serve as the outlet's general manager. As GM, Brady's duties will straddle the editorial and advertising dimensions of the biz.

What's the strategic thinking behind it?

Well, it's this: Brady and his co-brainstormers at Allbritton Communications took a look at the local media landscape and noticed something: All the big competitors for Web news in the region appear to have some legacy platform, like a newspaper or a TV station, that distracts them and keeps them from putting out the best possible Web product. In swoops PostKiller.com, a balls-out site that has no such baggage and can go all-Web-all-the-time! Hold on, let me go and proof that cover story before moving on to the next question!

What about staffing?

A memo from mogul Robert Allbritton put the employees of PostKiller.com at 50-plus. According to Brady, those will "mostly" consist of editorial talent, people that can really nail it day in and day out. But there'll be biz-side staffers as well as Web producers and so on.

It's a lot of people for a start-up in the middle of a general media crisis. Brady: "To win big, you gotta bet big."

What will this new beast cover?

In Brady's words: "We're going to pick and focus on areas relevant to people's daily lives—local entertainment, local sports and commuting and development and all of those local things—local politics....We're going to find niches of interest to local readers."

Oh shit, he just basically laid out the editorial focus of the Washington City Paper! (minus the commuting stuff, which we totally ignore) Maybe call it WashingtoncitypaperKiller.com

Back to serious: Brady acknowledged that even with a robust staff, the region is too sprawling—too heavy with all kinds of "verticals"—to cover comprehensively and "win the day" in D.C., Loudoun, Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax....

How is this thing ever going to fly if it doesn't have a paper edition to, like, actually bring in revenue?

Brady answers that question: "I'm still bullish on the fact that money is still going to move to Web...I think the money is there."

That's where Roger Black comes in. The paper has contracted with this renowned New York design guru to redo its newspaper and Web site. In recent weeks, Black has been meeting with staffers to get their ideas on freshening the look of the Post brand.

Like all deliberative processes at the Post, this one won't spawn a revolution. "Instead of a redesign, it'll be much more of a cleaning up of visually contrasting elements," says a Post source, referring to "typefaces changing from section to section," among other minor design problems.

In a Wednesday meeting with a group of newsroom leaders, Black pushed his audience to think expansively about what the paper needs and what it can eliminate. One attendee says Black will be focusing on how to fit the Post's journalism in an ever-shrinking news hole, as well as coming up with "strategies for helping stories pop off the page more."

Black certainly can't complain that he isn't getting enough help. To generate recommendations on the redesign, the Post has assembled 14 committees, each with reps from both the print and online sides of the operation. The best committee name is "The Crown Jewels," a panel that is presumably working on preserving and enhancing the greatest assets of the product. Other panel jurisdictions include the Sunday paper, agate and listings, and breaking news.

There's no telling where all the committees and the contract design talent will push the paper's Web site, which recently bumped its "washingtonpost.com" banner in favor of the iconic, bold-letter "The Washington Post." Top Post officials have declined comment on where the site's design is headed. The best we could get was this statement from a Washington Post spokesperson: "Roger Black is providing design consulting services to The Washington Post and our redesign effort will look at both the newspaper and the Web site."

In May 2008, Black completed an overhaul of the Washington Times site, an operation that resulted in a largely black homepage with a rotating box, or "cube," showcasing the moment's top news stories. The content "innovations" of the site may have been a bit ahead of their time, including "400,000 horizontal entry points, or 'news themes,'" integrated into the site, as well as this feature: "Communities built around topics and hosted by 'mayors' who moderate the debate each day, with related sub-communities called neighborhoods into the web site."

Black is a celebrated talent who has engineered the look of many "content-based media" sites, including MSNBC.com, Discovery.com, and @Home. On his site, Black conveys the thinking behind his work: "Media design is not just window-dressing. A redesign is not a 'face lift.' Design is the structural link between the customers and the product."

One observer has a less philosophical view of how Black appeals to his clients: "He designs newspaper sites that look like newspapers."

Black is the second high-flying, New York-based designer to take a whack at the Post site in as many years. In late 2007, executives at washingtonpost.com commissioned the Wonderfactory, a design shop that counts the Huffington Post, WebMD, and the Food Network among its clients, to make sense of the mishmash of links and images that clutter the homepage. Jim Brady, then executive editor of washingtonpost.com, expressed hope that the Wonderfactory look would hit the site by the November 2008 elections.

That never happened. Though the site has incorporated Wonderfactory's vision for a rejiggered Going Out Guide, most other parts of the firm's project have been abandoned. In the process, a whole lot of mock-ups were kicked to the curb. According to Wonderfactory Creative Director Joe McCambley, the Post paid for a user needs analysis, a user interface design, a "mood board exercise"—designed to help ferret out the company's design aesthetic—as well as redesign work on the homepage, article pages, and various section headers. The work cost the Post upwards of $200,000, according to an informed source. "They were an amazing client," says McCambley.

When asked about bagging the mock-ups, a Post spokesperson replied: "Some work done by Wonderfactory has already been used on our site—Going Out Guide, for example—and we will be using more. It was never an all or nothing approach."

Wonderfactory's work product reportedly didn't wow the Post's new guard, including Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. When pressed on this matter, however, Brauchli went generic, writing in an e-mail that the paper was in the "planning phase, so nothing to add."

This whole planning phase isn't working out too well for the people at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), the Arlington-based Post Co. subsidiary that has run the Post's Web site for more than a decade. Founded as an entity independent of the mother ship, WPNI was supposed to incubate Web publishing innovations away from the retrograde tugs of the newsroom's old guard. Over the years, the two sides have fought over everything from food to politics to personnel.

The accession of Weymouth as Post publisher in February 2008 marked the beginning of the end of the Post's separate-but-pretty-much-equal divide between paper and Web offices. Cross-river rivalries and personnel duplication, goes the Weymouth-era thinking, are no longer sustainable, and so the operations must merge.

Though the dot-com workers in Arlington have yet to move en masse to the main Post building at 15th and L Streets NW, one of the most painful aspects of the merger has already gone down. That would be the elimination of managerial redundancy. In a combined online-print newsroom, you can't have two publishers, two executive editors, and so on. In the end, there can be only one—that's an eerie theme of the 1986 fantasy-action flick Highlander that just so happens to apply to the modern-day Washington Post.

Getting down to one has repeatedly entailed the departure of top brass at WPNI. Publisher Caroline Little left last year, as did politics editor Russ Walker. Executive Editor Brady left his post at the end of January, followed by Tom Kennedy, washingtonpost.com's top multimedia manager. The only top WPNI personality to make it into the new management at the Post is former Web site Editor Liz Spayd, a longtime Postie who has deeper ties to the main newsroom than to the Web. Spayd is now one of Brauchli's co-managing editors; the other is Raju Narisetti, who lords over the Web operation, among other things.

The departures have left rank-and-file WPNIers feeling a touch exposed as the office merger looms. Little, Brady, et al. went to the mat repeatedly over the years to stick up for the Web site's autonomy and managed to push the newsroom on all kinds of Web innovations, including the embrace of blogging and comments from the public on articles. There's no telling whether the new structure will endow the company's Webby types with the sort of power necessary to strong-arm the newsroom as the Internet continues to develop.

According to sources, Brady decided to leave the company after learning that he wouldn't be appointed as a managing editor and that Web producers in the combined newsroom would likely be reporting to the paper's section editors, and not to a Web authority. Such org-chart dynamics matter greatly to the Post's digital future. If Web producers end up answering to section editors at the paper, they'll inevitably end up doing more work for the dead-tree product and less for washingtonpost.com. Increasingly strapped for resources, Post editors will find nice ways of hijacking this labor pool: Hey, Ms. Web Producer, we hear you have some excellent copy-editing skills!

Top Posties won't come close to discussing the lines of authority in the merged newsroom: "We know and value the tremendous creative talent in The Post's digital newsroom. Our plans recognize that strength and will enhance it," writes Brauchli via e-mail.

If so, Brauchli should brush up on his memo-writing skills. Dot-com personnel were scandalized to read his electronic missive on the change to a bold-letter banner on the Web site. It read, in part: "This recognizes what we all have long known: washingtonpost.com is very much part of The Washington Post, complementary and in some ways distinct, but an absolutely central part of who we are." The "complementary and in some ways distinct" part didn't go down too well in Arlington.

The patronizing tone of Brauchli's words conveys the current reality of the Washington Post—that the newsroom is swallowing the Web site, for better or worse. Says Brady: "They've wanted to control it forever and now they have their chance–and I hope it works out for the best. I think they'll find it's not as easy as it looks from the outside."

Says Brady on the question of whether his position will live: "I don't know the answer to that." As to why he's leaving, well, the merger is unquestionably a big part of it. Brady has been executive editor of washingtonpost.com for four years–a full Olympic cycle that Brady has spent on nearly equal footing with the big boss of the main newsroom. For most of Brady's tenure, that's been Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. Last year at this time, in fact, Brady was lording it all over the print guys, in a fight relating to the Post's coverage of national politics.

The newsroom had hired away washingtonpost.com's congressional blogger, Paul Kane, and was hoping that it could transfer Kane's slot to the newsroom as well–meaning that the print operation would essentially be taking a slot from dot-com. Brady said no dice–we'll be hiring our own congressional blogger.

In addition to turf battles of that sort, Brady has had the authority to ram important changes down the know-it-all throats of newsroom people. For instance, reporters at the Post once objected to allowing the posting of comments and to other initiatives now considered de rigueur for a newspaper's Web site.

"The battles that at times played out between the newspaper and the web site–how they play out is going to change," says Brady.

Indeed, and in a way that probably wouldn't have pleased Brady. Publisher Katharine Weymouth made it very clear when she hired Marcus Brauchli last summer: This fellow will control both the print and online operations.

"The job was going to change," says Brady, who had no great interest in moving into D.C. "I want to be on the digital side."

The dot-com chief also says he's needs a serious rebooting. "I have a track record," he says, of staying about four or five years at a job and then burning out. "I'm beat up, tired, burned out."

OK, but did Weymouth or anyone else hint that it was time for Brady to go? No way, he says: "My call."

Jim Brady, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com, is stepping down. Marcus Brauchli's memo follows the jump.

To the Staff:

I regret to announce that Jim Brady has informed us that he intends to step down as executive editor of washingtonpost.com.

Jim is a towering figure in online journalism. He was among its pioneers, having become sports editor of The Post’s online site in April 1995, before ricocheting to America Online, and then returning to lead our site. He is also among multimedia journalism’s most successful practitioners and exponents, with shelves of awards and trophies to show for the work he has led.

More important, though, he’s a strong, thoughtful and loyal leader. Just about everyone at washingtonpost.com owes his or her start or hiring or inspiration to Jim. He’s lured dozens of print journalists into the online world, too, and repeatedly turned pen-and-ink talent into pixel-and-byte genius.

I am extremely grateful that Jim has agreed to stay on through the presidential inauguration. That will give us some time to sort out how we will replace him and to address some of the inevitable structural questions that will arise in the coming year as we more closely integrate our print and online newsrooms.

We will miss Jim, but wish him all the best in next endeavors.

Marcus

Photo of Jim Brady by Darrow Montgomery

Read Erik Wemple's Feb. 15 piece about the challenges of integrating the Post's paper and online newsrooms.