Why the Washington Post is smart to keep it local

The Washington Post

(WPO) has long been one of a handful of what can rightfully claim to be great national newspapers. No longer. As of this week, the Post is adopting a humbler but perhaps savvier goal: to be a great regional newspaper -- albeit one with a national readership.

Years in the making, the shift in strategy is both epitomized and completed by the closure of its last domestic bureaus, in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. On an operational level, it's a relatively small matter, affecting only nine staffers. But as symbolism, it's big. "We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience," executive editor Marcus Brauchli told Howard Kurtz, the Post's in-house media columnist.