Washington Post's Internal Response To Selling Access for $25k+ Story

It's not easy to write when your mouth is hanging open and your eyes are spinning out of their sockets, but I'm going to give it a shot. Mike Allen of Politico has broken one heckuva shocking story, about Washington Post CEO and publisher Katherine Weymouth seeking to sell access to Obama administration officials and to her own reporters and editors, at "salons" in her home. In this economy and at this moment in the news industry, everyone knows that newspaper execs have got to get creative, but not like this.

According to Allen's story, "For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" -- Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors. The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff." The offer -- which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters -- is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival. And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.''

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