The Battle for November
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Aug. 27, 2010

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We routinely hear just how important an upcoming election is going to be, usually from reporters who cover political beats with a self-interest in ensuring that their copy gets better play.

Yet when America does vote on Nov. 2, the election might indeed live up to the hype. It's been gaining steam for months now -- some would contend the buildup began on Nov. 5, 2008 -- and the possibility that Barack Obama might lose his majorities in one or both houses of Congress long ago ceased to be a fantasy.

Neither is it a foregone conclusion, which is why political junkies get such a rush when these epic elections loom. (Think more of 2006, when Democrats won back their majority, for comparison. Oddly, the 1994 midterms didn't generate such a feel. So entrenched had the Democrats become that Republicans were skeptical of their own polling until just days and even hours before the vote; the hype followed the election, with "tsunami" and "tidal wave" becoming the operative and overworked words.)

No doubt, many issues are spinning in voters' heads, and there is certainly no better way to send a message than to mark your choices in a voting booth. But the hot button topics of this summer, magnified by the debate over the merits of constructing a mosque and Islamic cultural center not far from the site of the worst act of terrorism this country has ever endured, only seem to be a reflection of voter unease, not the cause of it.

One of the best sources I have found for figuring out what ails us politically is the reporting of Robert J. Samuelson, an apolitical observer of the dismal science whose power of analysis I've admired for years. Samuelson is not an economist, but his ability to understand what economists are saying gives perspective that explains the national mood. In our season of national grumpiness, such perspective can tell us why elections matter.

"The weak labor market is clearly a powerful psychological poison." Samuelson wrote in June. "Almost everyone knows someone who is or was unemployed -- a jobless recent college grad, an idle construction worker, a fired manager. ... Unemployment and prolonged joblessness hover near postwar peaks. Once lost, a job is hard to find. Almost half (46 percent) of the 15 million unemployed have been jobless six months or longer. Nearly a fifth of the labor force is unemployed, working part time involuntarily or so discouraged they've stopped looking for work."

In the same column, Samuelson reached a conclusion that anticipated the country's condition heading into Labor Day: "What's missing are 'animal spirits,' in the famous phrase of economist John Maynard Keynes. In the boom, surplus animal spirits spurred speculation. Scarce animal spirits now hinder recovery. Given the magnitude of the housing and financial carnage, most of today's cautiousness and risk aversion -- by both businesses and households -- were unavoidable. But the Obama administration's anti-business rhetoric and controversial health 'reform' may have compounded the effect. These policies created uncertainties and fanned partisan rancor. In the case of health 'reform,' they raised the cost of future full-time employees.

"The administration believes these various policies don't hamper economic recovery. It ignores contradictions and inconsistencies. Historians, more detached and better informed, may conclude otherwise."

Time and again, Samuelson explains what is not happening. Take jobs. "So far, history be damned," he wrote in late July as corporate profits were starting to register impressive gains. "The contrast between revived profits and stunted job growth is stunning. From late 2007 to late 2009, payroll employment dropped nearly 8.4 million. Since then, the economy has recovered a scant 11 percent of those lost jobs. Companies are doing much better than workers; that defines today's economy."

Or parenting: "Our society does not -- despite rhetoric to the contrary -- put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline."

Not the most comforting words, for sure, and certainly nothing a politician could use for a sound bite. But Samuelson, one of the better explanatory journalists around, does not mount his soap box in order to tell you how to vote. The information and interpretation he provides, however, should be enough to make you want to.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

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When it comes to the immigration debate, you might say that Ruben Navarrette Jr. and Edward Schumacher-Matos have each spent a lifetime preparing to cover it. And you would be absolutely correct.

Navarrette, a native of Central California, is the grandson of an immigrant from Mexico. Schumacher-Matos, a native of Colombia, earned his U.S. citizenship by joining the Army and serving during the Vietnam War.

Both columnists have built their professional reputations exploring a wide range of topics -- Navarrette on education, politics, and responsibility issues; Schumacher-Matos on Latin America and other foreign policy subjects. And now, they own the immigration story.

What's so amazing to me is that, amid all the heat being generated, Navarrette and Schumacher-Matos are coming across as two of the more sensible voices in the immigration debate. To read their columns is to find reasoned arguments, reasonably debated.

Columnists don't ask you to agree with them; they offer, instead, fuel for the fire. It's up to readers to determine how much they want to pour on. In the cases of Navarrette and Schumacher-Matos, that fuel has been in the form of perspective and context that counters both the left and the right extremes now driving this discussion.

Or, as one of Navarrette's readers put it in a recent e-mail correspondence: "I want to note that I do not always agree with you but you always force me to think, which is exactly what I want someone to do."

There's certainly plenty to think about concerning immigration, especially illegal immigration. Having lived in both California and Arizona, I'm acutely aware of some of the problems law enforcement and social service agencies face. Yet I've also seen first-hand what illegal immigrants do once they've crossed the border: they go right to work. And at jobs I'm pretty certain I'd never want to touch. Try picking broccoli eight hours a day or longer. No thanks.

It would seem that if there really is a crisis with illegal immigration, then policymakers could pretty much deal with it by issuing work permits to those who want to come into the country to fill jobs waiting for them, while allowing the undocumented already here to be legitimized and put them on the path to citizenship. If we could assimilate millions of Cubans over the 50 years of the Castro brothers' reign, it should be a no-brainer to assimilate immigrants from countries we're not at ideological war with.

But nothing in politics is quite that easy, and certainly not so clear-cut. As Navarrette noted in a column written from Phoenix shortly after a federal judge ruled some parts of Arizona's new immigration law to be unconstitutional: "(Arizonans) weren't prepared for the demographic side effect: the gradual sense that they were losing control, and the fear that whites would eventually become a statistical minority in Arizona just as they are in California, Texas and New Mexico."

And, as Schumacher-Matos pointed out in an open letter to President Obama and congressional Democrats, elections can get in the way. Urging a stronger approach on the immigration issue before this fall's midterm vote, he asked the president to "find your inner Margaret Thatcher. As she taught Ronald Reagan, half the trick in politics is to take command by framing the issues. The policy, morality and politics of illegal immigration are all aligned in your favor, a rare opportunity if only you break out of an outdated mindset about enforcement and go on offense. Even Latinos will support you."

With that last sentence, Schumacher-Matos was referring to the fact that of the estimated 47 million Hispanics in this country, most are here legally, the majority are U.S. citizens and many are native-born. Now the country's largest minority group, the influence and political impact of American Latinos will only grow -- as it has with other fields such as business, academe, popular culture and the law.

Still, the political stalemate remains, with Republicans seemingly intent on freezing out the Latino vote with every "immigration control" idea they embrace (see this E.J. Dionne Jr. column on abolishing the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment) while Democrats sit on their hands, paralyzed to do much of anything for fear of what awaits them come November.

Which gives Navarrette and Schumacher-Matos plenty of time to keep chasing one helluva story. It's an exciting and challenging one indeed. But in truth, it's the story of their lives.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Lowering the Volume
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2010

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A few days ago, a gentleman with an ax to grind pulled his car into a parking space in front of The Washington Post building and, using loudspeakers he had rigged to the roof of the vehicle, proceeded to harangue about an injustice he had suffered -- for almost three hours.

Turns out he was unhappy with the way a letter to the editor that he submitted had been edited. Now normally, most folks voice their gripes when their letters are not run. This guy was complaining that his had actually been published. (You can watch video here.)

Fair enough, it's a free country. Yet something about his endless shouting brought to mind the political climate we are now in, which seemed at boiling point under the summer sun. It's as if too many of us have been given loudspeakers, and the noise has made us unable to think.

Certainly, the Obama administration wasn't thinking when it moved with dispatch to throw an African-American employee of the Department of Agriculture under the bus because it feared her comments about an exchange with a white farmer, made at an NAACP gathering, captured on video and posted by conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, would be fodder for Fox News' Glenn Beck.

But closer inspection proved that the woman, Shirley Sherrod, had actually been making quite a different point in her parable about the farmer. And while Brietbart momentarily had been hoisted on his own petard, it was the White House that was suffering the public relations disaster.

The incident, which might rate a footnote 50 years from now, became a running story for a few news cycles, then tapered off almost as quickly as it tapered on. Still, the fallout continues to settle.

E.J. Dionne Jr. thinks the media had something to do with it -- and no, not that media disguised as partisan cable television networks blasting "opinion" seemingly throughout the day and long into the night. Dionne's complaint was with the fourth estate.

"The mainstream media ... must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that 'fairness' requires treating extremist rants as 'one side of the story,'" he wrote in a column that was shared more than 6,000 times by Facebook users, a remarkable figure.

In a follow-up column, Dionne set down what he thinks is at stake: "I'm a chronic optimist about America. But we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power."

Dionne is a liberal, a thinking person's liberal, but his thoughts here are not all that different from Michael Gerson's, a thinking person's conservative. Commenting on the NAACP's resolution condemning what it called tea party racism (what got Brietbart started off in the first place), and an ensuring racist parody posted to the Internet by a tea party advocate, Gerson found cause for hope.

"Beneath this depressing controversy, the facts are more encouraging," he wrote. "The NAACP resolution did not conclude that the tea party movement as a whole is racist; it called upon its leadership to repudiate racist elements."

Then noting that the National Tea Party Federation has expelled the advocate and his organization over the blog posting, Gerson added: "These developments are small but significant signs of sanity."

What Dionne and Gerson are accomplishing here is to add perspective -- beyond the noise. It's one thing to watch video clips of some outrage over and over again (although why you would want to has always been beyond me), another to critically examine means to achieve a better discourse and government.

More civility wouldn't hurt, as David S. Broder discovered when he ventured to Delaware to view first-hand the U.S. Senate campaign between Republican Mike Castle and Democrat Chris Coons.

As Broder noted, "I spent the weekend with two Senate candidates who will restore your faith in representative government."

While we're talking civility, let's take politics out of it for a moment and just enjoy this thought from Kathleen Parker about her "small town" neighborhood she is leaving for new things in a bigger city.

"Families come in many configurations," she wrote. "And small-town values have nothing to do with small towns."

And somehow, I think, if we all just lower our voices, we'll conclude that American values -- and our First Amendment right to defend them -- are too precious to be left solely to the province of those with loudspeakers.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Against the Grain
Posted by James Hill on Friday, July 9, 2010

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Michael Gerson is pretty good at dishing it out to Democrats, much as E.J. Dionne Jr. gives it to Republicans. Solid political commentary. Turn the tables, however, as both did this week, and the commentary becomes remarkable.

Gerson's come-to-Jesus message -- warning the GOP to be wary of extremism in the pursuit of a congressional majority -- may well be one of the most important polemics of the midterm election season, arguing as it does for conservatives to maintain a high ground at a time when the low road seems to be the preferred path most traveled.

Dionne's defense of the gaffe-prone Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was in itself a defense of the right of dissent, and he reminded Democrats that they were making calls to silence Steele at their peril.

My hunch is that neither columnist won many fans among their customary audiences. But they sure should have won lots of respect.

Let's start with Gerson, whose service as a Capitol Hill aide and speech writer for President George W. Bush gives him principled credibility with conservatives.

Looking at the potential for extremism to damage the gains that the GOP is likely to score in this fall's midterm elections, Gerson took particular umbrage with Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle's contention that "if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."

Mike was having none of it. "Mainstream conservatives have been strangely disoriented by tea party excess, unable to distinguish the injudicious from the outrageous," he wrote. "Some rose to Angle's defense or attacked her critics. Just to be clear: A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt -- a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of 'Second Amendment remedies' is a light-weight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory."

And this was just for starters. He goes after libertarians such as Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, and those who are feasting on anti-immigration hysteria.

"The response of many responsible Republicans to these ideological trends is to stay quiet, make no sudden moves and hope they go away," Gerson wrote. "But these are not merely excesses; they are arguments. Significant portions of the Republican coalition believe that it is a desirable strategy to talk of armed revolution, embrace libertarian purity and alienate Hispanic voters. With a major Republican victory in November, those who hold these views may well be elevated in profile and influence. And this could create durable, destructive perceptions of the Republican Party that would take decades to change. A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them."

Dionne, consistently one of the most respected voices among American progressives, thinks Democrats should lower the volume over Steele, who got himself in hot water -- again -- for saying that Afghanistan had become "a war of Obama's choosing." Republicans were the first to pounce, many calling for Steele's head. Democrats soon joined in.

Step back, Dionne urged the Democrats. "The issue here is less about Afghanistan than about dissent in time of war. Even if Steele was just popping off, he had a right to offer his opinion without being accused of undermining our troops or 'rooting for failure.'"

Columnists are valued for their independence. It separates them from the ideologues and propagandists, and is absolutely necessary for critical thinking. Commentators who speak for right or left are utterly predictable, and thoroughly boring.

But there's another moral to remember. Journalists often overwork the phrase "speaking truth to power," usually because they don't. By going against the grain, Gerson and Dionne certainly did.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Nothing but Net
Posted by James Hill on Monday, June 28, 2010

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Enough has been said about David Weigel, who resigned as The Washington Post's blogger covering the conservative movement after derogatory comments he made on a listserv before he was hired by the newspaper showed up on other websites, including the much-viewed Drudge Report.

Not enough has been said about the www.culture now firmly embedding itself in newsrooms around the world. But maybe it should be, so perhaps we can start a conversation.

Despite the fact that most newspapers got into electronic publishing in the mid-to-late-1990s, many in our industry treat it as a field that clearly remains stuck in infancy. The most often cited excuse for this state of affairs is that the Internet was regarded as an afterthought.

This hasn't been true at The Washington Post, which has devoted a huge chunk of resources in developing washingtonpost.com. Nor has it been the case with several other newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in particular. But yes, you could make a good argument that most newspapers are falling far behind when it comes to harnessing the Net. Or, rather, trying too hard to catch up, which is where I'd put my assessment. But what, exactly, is up?

Newsroom veterans often shake their heads, because a lot of things that were "up" turned out to be nonstarters. Not too long ago, for instance, the rage was to have a reporter shoot video while working a story. Only the video turned out to be not very well done, and editors came to realize that if readers wanted to watch television, they would usually turn on their TVs.

Blogging, however, has not been one of those false starts. Newspaper websites have largely embraced the concept, and blogs are being used to produce fine and cutting-edge journalism. One of the pioneers, Keven Willey, the editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News, now features six blogs on her opinion pages at dallasnews.com. Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, began the PostPartisan blog during the 2008 political campaign. It is now a regular feature on washingtonpost.com and postpartisan commentaries also show up on the print edition op-ed page.

Yet here again, most editors might be guilty of treating blogs as an afterthought. Clearly, you probably can't check out everything a writer had posted to a listserv before he was hired by your news organization, but it wouldn't hurt to look carefully at a blogger's copy before it goes public. And even the top news organizations have suffered embarrassments because they didn't.

Because the Internet is in a state of hyperevolution, it has become trendy to accept that a wired culture is something far different than the newsroom culture that existed when print was king. But here's a thought: Newspapers have always existed as the public record because they were archived, not only by the newspapers themselves but by libraries and historical societies. Now that the archiving is electronic -- and close to instantaneous in one's ability to retrieve -- doesn't it make sense to get it right when you put your name and your newspaper's name on that record?

The Internet's very immediacy would seem to demand vigorous editing, fact-checking and, yes, caution. This should never be an afterthought.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.




Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Posted by James Hill on Friday, June 11, 2010

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Throughout his long career, David S. Broder has distinguished himself with his objectivity, the strength of his analysis, and his easygoing way of communicating with his readers. To borrow from an old advertising line, when Broder speaks, people listen.

So if you are getting a little sick and tired of all the partisan bickering that passes for national discourse these days, you might want to heed a little advice from the dean of Washington political correspondents -- and take in a ball game.

That's what Broder did Tuesday evening, along with more than 40,000 others, to watch the pitching debut of Stephen Strasburg, a young man who seems to invite superlatives because, so far at least, his pitching has been nothing short of superlative.

It wasn't lost on Broder that this could be just what Washington needs, a baseball team with the horses to become a contender.

"Much as Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 spurred hopes that a new era was opening, so long-suffering fans fantasized that with Strasburg pitching and this year's No. 1 choice, junior college slugger Bryce Harper, on the way, the Nationals were destined for better things."

Maybe. But the point of Broder's column wasn't so much about Strasburg -- who, by the way, was absolutely stunning in striking out 14 batters, one short of the record for a rookie making his first start -- as it was getting our collective minds off of the problems, many real, many imagined, that surround us.

Broder should know. He's covered Washington since the Kennedy years, and anyone who follows his writing knows that the divisiveness, which really got cooking during the Bill Clinton administration, went thermonuclear under George W. Bush and remains that way with Barack Obama, pains him for what it is doing not only to the American character but our ability as a society to get things done. Representative government doesn't work when the representatives won't work with each other.

This is not to say that partisanship is particularly bad, or a relatively new phenomenon. People take sides because they believe something is worth fighting for, and we've been fighting for political causes since, no, make that before, the birth of the republic.

What makes it seem so hostile today, however, is that partisanship has become instantaneous. Look how long it took for that open-microphone comment by California Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina to go, as they say, viral. About a nanosecond.

But back to baseball, or more particularly, sport. As Broder noted, "A fascinating test of the curative power of sports has been unfolding this week on both sides of the Atlantic, as Washington and Johannesburg look to athletes to lift the gloom surrounding their political leaders."

That the World Cup can transfix the attention of most of the world for four weeks every four years indeed does say everything about the power of a game -- excuse me, the beautiful game -- to be the great unifier. Too bad America isn't as hooked on soccer (or, really, too bad the rest of the world isn't hooked on the National Football League).

Broder tossed some cold reality onto South Africa's coming out party, noting that the Cup will not solve the many problems that the beautiful but star-crossed nation faces. But at least it can enjoy its party and if it pulls it off like China did the Olympics, maybe it can get back to work with a better appreciation of itself.

And maybe the U.S. Congress might too if, taking an idea that Broder tossed out a few years ago when it became obvious that baseball was coming back to Washington after a 33-year drought, members would take in a game or two and get their minds off trying to destroy each other. Like dreams of October glory, one can always hope.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

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Even though the Washington Nationals are vastly improved this year, politics still retains its claim as the pastime of preference in the nation's capital. And what a season it is turning out to be.

Tuesday's primary elections in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas provided a snapshot of what the playoffs might look like come November, while a race to fill a House seat in western Pennsylvania offered Democrats a glimmer of hope that perhaps the tea party movement might have peaked too soon (alternative view: the White House really has got some game).

Voting was only the half of it. The best drama was playing off the field. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal got caught in a lie; Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana got caught in a tryst and resigned from Congress; Kentucky ophthalmologist Rand Paul got caught dissing some provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and spent his second full day as a Republican Senate nominee on a treadmill -- backtracking.

As Ruth Marcus noted: "Politicians excel at trying on costumes, assuming identities (the angry populist, the slayer of pork), delivering lines written by others. Is it any wonder that the division between fantasy and reality starts to blur for some of them?"

Yet the childish behavior of some couldn't cloud over the fact that something -- perhaps not a Thai-level protest but nonetheless a lot of anger -- was in the air. E.J. Dionne Jr., however, isn't buying it.

"Pennsylvania's 12th District (where Democrat Mark Critz won by nine points over Republican Tim Burns) is precisely the sort of seat Republicans will need to win this fall if they are to take over the House. It is, for example, the only district in the country that switched from Democrat John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008," wrote Dionne.

"Even though Obama's standing in the region is lower than it is nationwide, Burns' rote Republican campaign against Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi failed miserably. Democrats, in the meantime, believe they have found a formula to keep some of the more conservative districts they now hold."

George F. Will found this an interesting, if slightly odd, strategy: "The candidate who on Tuesday won the special election in a Pennsylvania congressional district is right-to-life and pro-gun. He accused his opponent of wanting heavier taxes. He said he would have voted against Barack Obama's health care plan and promised to vote against cap-and-trade legislation, which is a tax increase supposedly somehow related to turning down the planet's thermostat. This candidate, Mark Critz, is a Democrat. And that just about exhausts the good news for Democrats on a surreal Tuesday."

But as these things go, Democrats found some good news nevertheless. Paul, the son of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, quickly succumbed to that most dreaded of all political ailments -- foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Even before that development, Eugene Robinson wasn't too sure the GOP should be high-fiving just yet.

"The stunning result (in Kentucky) should telegraph two warnings to Republicans," he wrote. "The first is a reminder that while voters' ardor toward the Democratic Party might have cooled, this has not led to a passionate embrace of the GOP. There's a splash-back effect from unceasing attacks against the evil empire known as Washington: Voters notice that Republicans live there, too.

"The second warning is that the Tea Party movement does not intend to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. Strategists who hoped to use the movement's energy and passion as weapons against the Democrats in the fall should realize that many Tea Party types see the GOP as fundamentally no different."

Michael Gerson, a conservative, could be read as endorsing liberal Robinson's second point.

"Paul and other libertarians are not merely advocates of limited government; they are anti-government," Gerson wrote. "Their objective is not the correction of error but the cultivation of contempt for government itself. There is a reason libertarianism has never been -- and probably will never be -- a national political force: because too many would find its utopia a nightmare."

David S. Broder kept his eyes on the ball while speculating what the action in late spring could mean in the fall.

"We saw the anti-Washington sentiment Tuesday in Kentucky, where Rand Paul ... easily defeated Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's handpicked candidate for the Republican nomination for a vacant Senate seat -- and credited his win to the tea partyers," Broder commented.

"The same sentiment carried to Arkansas, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff by her labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

"And it claimed its largest victim of the year so far in Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter. Run out of the Republican Party last year by a GOP challenger, he fell embarrassingly to a less-known younger congressman in a bid for the Democratic nomination. His failure showed the Obama White House once again to be a toothless tiger -- with its endorsements now having failed in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. No good news for the president there."

What does it all mean? Let George Will have the last words: "Has American politics ever been this entertaining?"

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Brave News World
Posted by James Hill on Friday, May 7, 2010

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Many were the obituaries when The Washington Post Co. announced it was putting Newsweek up for sale. This won't be one of them.

For one, it's a bit premature. And for another, it's not like the magazine hasn't been in this spot before. As Benjamin C. Bradlee relates in his 1995 autobiography, "A Good Life," he began hearing rumors of Newsweek's demise almost from the day he joined its Washington bureau -- in 1957.

"I dreaded these stories, not so much because I admired the management (I did not), but because I felt the bastards I knew were bound to be better than the bastards I didn't know," he wrote.

By 1961, with the magazine then in the hands of the Vincent Astor Foundation, Bradlee -- "after a bad day of brooding, and a few shooters" -- picked up the phone and called Philip Graham, then the publisher of the Post, and suggested that he should make a bid for the publication.

"It was the best telephone call I ever made -- the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding, totally rewarding," Bradlee noted.

When Jon Meacham, Newsweek's editor who reportedly is trying to line up a bid to purchase the magazine from Phil Graham's son, Post Co. chairman of the board Donald E. Graham, writes his memoirs, here's hoping he can say much the same about his experiences.

Yet this posting is only marginally about Newsweek, a magazine I have read for years, and more about the news industry's exciting possibilities -- if we get the technological changes right.

Let Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson explain what's going on. Celebrating Apple's next big thing, the iPad (or perhaps bemoaning the fact his wife thinks the device is an extravagance he can do without), he writes: "The combination of the Internet and the iPad has changed our relation to the written word forever. The Information Age is now affordable, portable, intuitively organized and infinitely customizable. All future content, including books and newspapers, will need to assume the shape of this innovation."

That's quite an admission coming from an admitted book junkie like Gerson ("I surrounded myself with books on shelves, books in boxes, books in random stacks that caused visitors to trip"). But it also underscores what even we luddites who long for the days when big cities had multiple newspapers surely know deep within out hearts: We adapt to change when change becomes useful and friendly to us.

Think of cellular phones. When they were the size of Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, most of us vowed we'd never be caught dead with one.

That's a little bit of what the news industry has been doing the last couple of decades while wrestling with technological changes no one could even imagine when Ben Bradlee made that call in 1961. The industry first pretended it was no big deal, then changed gears but still didn't quite know where it was going. Today's fad is page views. Tomorrow's? Who knows.

It seems obvious, however, that if a device comes along that allows users to access information much as they would if they were visiting a bookstore or buying a newspaper or magazine, and have that information presented in a more orderly fashion than currently is the case on most computers (in other words, not having to print out lengthy texts you really want or need to read), then this presents a huge opportunity for news media to concentrate on core competencies rather than constantly trying to escape the trap they fell into.

Gerson is not the only one enraptured by the new Apple wonder. So is his son (who spent his own money to buy the device Mike plays with) and so is my sister, a charter member of the gadgeterrati who is passing along to me her MacBook because she loves her iPad so much more.

And Gerson offers a clue as to where this is going: "We know that even bibliophiles like me will purchase books that arrive via the Internet because it represents a quantum leap in convenience. We know that people will consume both good and unreliable news on the Internet when it comes free. Because of the iPad (and its eventual competitors), we will be able to test whether people will pay for excellent news content delivered on a platform that multiplies its usefulness and enjoyment."

A word of caution: You should probably read this column by Daniel Lyons in Newsweek (there's that name again) on Apple's pricing strategy.

But you also better start thinking that with this type of device taking off, Newsweek and other publications might just have a better future than any oddsmaker was willing to offer them just months ago. In other words, not dead yet.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.