Well, it took a few days, but the opinionmakers over at the Washington Post came up with some impressions on how D.C. public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee handled herself at a pivotal Thursday hearing before the D.C. Council. Here's the WaPo editorial board, which hardly interrupts its yearslong standing ovation of the Rhee regime:
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If you see any typos in today's Washington Post, there's a good reason. Very little work went down at the 15th and L HQ yesterday, what with all the chatter about the reorganization plan handed down by the paper's top editors.

Much of the gossip continues to center on the plans of acclaimed Metro columnist Marc Fisher. As reported yesterday, current Assistant Managing Editor for Metro Robert McCartney is sliding into a columnist position, and they'll be hiring yet another one soon. Fisher appears likely to move into another job with the organization, likely as an editor. It's not clear what that position is.

Yet there are many other points of discussion. Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli released the re-org memo to Posties early in the work day and then convened a Town Hall meeting in the afternoon.

Reviews of that session weren't terribly positive. Staffers apparently pelted upper management with questions about exactly how this elaborate new organization would work. The memo, you see, talks about how the paper is creating a "universal desk," to be headed by current top biz editor Sandy Sugawara, that'll shovel all kinds of content from the newsroom onto platforms.

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As discussed in an amazing earlier post, the Washington Post blew up its newsroom today. Via the most masterfully written, almost inspiring, re-org memo, Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli changed forever the way that Posties take stories, blog items, and Tweets, and channel them to the paper's various platforms. The memo is not only chockablock with new ways of working, but also promulgates a number of key personnel changes, including the move of sports editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz to the chief of local news.

However, the most pivotal figure in this whole deal isn't even mentioned in the memo. He's Metro columnist Marc Fisher. Several sources in the newsroom are whispering that something big is up with Fisher.

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Marcus Brauchli has been executive editor of the Washington Post for nearly eight months. A lot of that time he's spent burrowing into coverage of the global economic meltdown, having meetings with key individuals, and banging away at his BlackBerry. Changes, as is customary at the Post, have come slowly and cautiously, such as the decision to curb duplication in obituary writing on the Metro and Style pages.

This morning, however, Brauchli dumped the Mr. Incremental persona in favor of Change Agent, handing down an enormous, nearly 1,700-word memo blowing up the newsroom. No more Balkanized Washington Post, with nine million fiefdoms, all with their own top bosses who tussle and muscle each other over every little thing.

In the new Post world, there'll be three top editors: Kevin Merida, in charge of national stuff; Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the current sports editor who'll take over local coverage; and Sandy Sugawara, the current business editor who's going to be in charge of a "universal" news desk that'll funnel all kinds of content into print, the Web, and so on.

The rest of the changes kinda flow from that new structure, with massive personnel upheaval, and desks and titles moving around the place like gchats. But one newsroom change towers above all the others for Posties as well as readers.

The memo announces that Assistant Managing Editor for Metro Robert McCartney will leave his current perch to take a job as a Metro columnist. He's run excellent Metro coverage since mid-2005, when he was chosen to succeed Jo-Ann Armao. His people love him, he's had good relations with the Web folks, and he did fabulous things for the long-suffering feature hole in Metro's front page.

So the move to providing content is nothing short of a shocker. In mid-December, McCartney sent out a notice announcing that his desk would be hiring a new columnist. The memo called the move "exciting news," doubtless a reference to the extraordinary act of hiring in these tough media times. Here's what the job announcement said, in part: "We want a columnist who becomes a must-read feature in the paper and on the Web. We want a columnist who can offer a compelling and provocative read twice a week, who is an exceptional reporter, voiced writer and deep thinker. We want a columnist who has a lot to say and really looks forward to saying it."

Who knows---perhaps the boss fashioned a job description so delicious that he just had to have it himself. The Dick Cheney of the Washington Post? Or is McCartney's position separate from the one that the paper declared open in December?

Either way, management seems happy with the move, if the re-org memo is to be believed:

Bob McCartney, who has served the paper so well as AME/Metro for the last four years, will become a Metropolitan columnist, one of our leading voices in the community where Bob grew up and has lived and run coverage for so long. His distinguished career as a foreign correspondent, managing editor of the International Herald Tribune and the first AME of the continuous news desk, and as a business editor and a reporter gives him the kind of depth and wisdom that will infuse his writing with authority and insight.

Unsaid is how long it's been since McCartney scored regular bylines---that would be about 18 years, judging from a quick Nexis search. Correction 4/17: This part is wrong: McCartney picked up regular bylines in 2003, as a correspondent from Paris. I apologize for the mistake. So McCartney can management employees, but can he manage sources again? I'd say yes---he'll get the magic back.

The bigger consideration---and it's a huge one---relates to the lineup of Metro columnists. Here they are: McCartney, Marc Fisher, John Kelly, and Courtland Milloy. The relevant percentages: 75 percent white, 100 percent male.

Now, there is no way this can stand at the Washington Post. Just no way. Not at a paper that over the years has taken great pains to ensure diversity within its reportorial corps. The boys club on the Metro page this morning emerged as one of the top items of gossip in the Post newsroom.

Answers on Metro columnist diversity, though, are tough to come by right now. Sources at the Post appear to be digesting the news and not picking up the phone.

One editor in a position to know, however, says there's "more to come on columnists." The editor did say that McCartney is not moving into the columnist slot announced in December.

This afternoon, there's a "town hall" meeting on the changes at the Post. Turn off that BlackBerry, Brauchli!

Memo after jump.

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The Vatican's D.C.-based media operation offered a common deal to eight or nine news organizations this week: We'll give you the details on an important Vatican position paper on biomedical ethics, so long as you agree to embargo the information.

The embargo time was a bit unorthodox, to be sure: 6 a.m. today--a time that coincided with the 12 p.m. release of the position paper in Rome.

So just about all of the media outlets on the Vatican's short list kept the story out of their Friday print editions. The Washington Times, however, went ahead with the piece, right on page A1: "Vatican Condemns Cloning, In Vitro." The story by Julia Duin detailed how the church had come out strongly against "common biomedical innovations."

The church saw an outright violation of media doctrine. "I haven’t had anyone pull anything like this in my whole history of working here," says Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It's utterly reprehensible." Asked what recourse the organization had with respect to the Washington Times, Walsh responded, "I can’t imagine ever risking giving them anything embargoed," she says.

John Solomon, the Washington Times' top editor, says compliance with the embargo was a huge concern of his staff. The piece didn't debut on washingtontimes.com until 6:01 am, he says. And the staff concluded that if the story ran only in the late edition of the paper, which leaves a Baltimore printing plant at 5 am, its distribution would comply with the embargo. Solomon says the paper should have done more to clarify just what a 6 a.m. embargo means for print copies, and regrets not having taken up that issue with Walsh. "I'm a Catholic myself, so I'll take an extra confession round this week," says Solomon.

Those exchanges between layman and clergy, however, won't help Washington Post print subscribers, the real victims here. The paper, after all, left the story out of all of its editions. Says Metro chief Robert McCartney: "The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told our reporter that the 6 a.m. embargo meant the story could not appear in morning editions of the newspaper. The conference also told us it said the same thing to The Washington Times. We put the story on our Web site at 6 a.m., in line with the embargo."