Web Traffic (or Lack of) May Be a Reason for a Columnist’s Dismissal

The political columnist Dan Froomkin was hired by The Huffington Post last week, two short weeks after being fired by a more traditional Post, the venerable newspaper in Washington.

In his departure from The Washington Post, there may be a lesson for journalists: keep close tabs on Web traffic.

The Washington Post indicated that a slump in visitors to Mr. Froomkin’s well-known Web column, White House Watch, contributed to its decision not to renew his contract in June. The popularity of Mr. Froomkin’s column was tied in part to its consistent critiques of the Bush administration, and he acknowledges that his page views declined after President Obama took office.

Still, the rationale — even if it was masking other reasons for Mr. Froomkin’s departure — surprised some writers who are uncomfortable being judged by their Web traffic. The Washington City Paper, in an analysis of Mr. Froomkin’s departure, called it a historical marker for The Post, “the first time that a major personnel decision has hinged so squarely on Web hits.”

“It’s an unusual public rationale for serious newspaper people, that’s for sure,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.

Mr. Froomkin, a contract employee who worked from home, wrote more than 1,000 columns for The Post’s Web site, beginning in 2004. He filtered the news media’s coverage of Mr. Bush through a critical lens, writing in his farewell column that when he thinks of the Bush years, “I think of the lies. There were so many.”

He regularly criticized the news media’s handling of the president, saying in a final column last month that “mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long.”

Mr. Froomkin’s dismissal raised a remarkable amount of ire among many liberal bloggers, some of whom wondered whether there were ideological motives for The Post’s decision. His fans sense that he will be more valued at Arianna Huffington’s Post, where he will write regular dispatches and manage four reporters in Washington.

Like Ms. Huffington, Mr. Froomkin speaks supportively of a “call it like you see it, let the chips fall where they may” style of journalism, a tacit rejection of the “triangulation” style that he says is too common in Washington.

In his discussions with The Post about his dismissal, “I was never entirely clear on what their reasoning was,” Mr. Froomkin said in an interview, adding that traffic was “one of the things they mentioned.” He does not think that traffic was “the major factor.”

Similarly, news media critics like Mark Glaser, the executive editor of the PBS blog MediaShift, have suggested that Mr. Froomkin’s dismissal was a consequence of the difficult merger of the print and Web sides of The Post. He noted that the company could be hiding other reasons for the decision, “but I’m not sure if we’ll ever know that for sure.”

Mr. Froomkin said that executives told him that they were reviewing all contracts for the Web site. The two sides had clashed in the past over the column, including over Mr. Froomkin’s tendency to criticize the news media. Mr. Rosen said he believed The Post cited traffic declines to feed its narrative that “the column had run its course.”

The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, said in a blog post that “reduced traffic played a big role” in the decision. Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of The Post, told The City Paper that “his traffic had gone way down.”

Mr. Hiatt referred an interview request to the paper’s spokeswoman, who refused to comment. Detailed Web traffic data of newspapers is not normally shared with the public, and it is unclear how often traffic is a factor in personnel decisions.

More broadly, journalists are adjusting, sometimes awkwardly, to the assessments of popularity made possible by the Web. Gone are the days where reader letters and telephone surveys were the best gauges of a newspaper section’s popularity.

Making decisions based on user preferences makes sense, to a point, and the careers of television journalists are certainly measured in part by TV ratings. Mr. Rosen said he was sure The Post had “dropped features that were not very popular with the users of WashingtonPost.com.”

At online publications, “there are some things you do whether or not people click on them, and there are some things you do because you’re hoping to get clicks,” Mr. Froomkin said.

If those in the second category are not popular, it is perfectly reasonable to phase them out, he added, but he placed his column squarely in the first category. “It was a very appropriate thing for The Post to do even if not a lot of people were reading it,” he said.

Mr. Glaser said he was wary of some applications of Web data, like the blog network Gawker Media’s trials of pay bonuses based on traffic.

“Raw traffic numbers should not be the only gauge of a writer’s work,” Mr. Glaser said in an e-mail message. “I would also look at the quality of the work, whether they’ve broken important news, whether they provide a certain voice for the publication, whether they have a loyal audience that returns often and comments more, whether they are the start of other conversations on other blogs and forums.”

Page views and visitor counts can be misleading if viewed out of context. Mr. Froomkin said his traffic suffered when White House Watch switched to a blog format, requiring fewer clicks for readers reach it and fewer page views for the feature. The columnist had also pushed for more links from The Post’s home page, generally the most important promotional place on any Web site.

By no means had White House Watch lost all its influence. Mr. Rosen observed, “If The Post thought Froomkin was valuable, and they wanted to maintain that asset, they would have expected a drop in traffic after Bush left,” and would have helped to rebuild the franchise.

Instead, he will rebuild it at The Huffington Post beginning at the end of July. Ms. Huffington is happy to have the traffic.

It’s clear from the reaction to Mr. Froomkin’s dismissal, she said, that The Washington Post “underestimated how strong Dan’s following is.”

“As for traffic,” she added, “I have no doubt that Dan, both as an editor and as a writer, will be a traffic magnet for us.”