PressEthic

Two of the Washington Post's top political reporters will leave the paper for an upstart political website owned by Allbritton Communications. This company, which already owns a local TV station and a local cable news station, is also starting a Washington newspaper, The Capitol Leader, all of which will be incorporated into this multi-media website.

The departures of John Harris, the Post’s political editor, and Jim VandeHei, a national political reporter, combined with that of David von Drehle, a longtime Post writer and editor, who announced last week he was leaving to become a national correspondent for Time, caused Jack Shafer, of Slate.com, to wonder "Are journalists leaping from the newspaper ship before it sinks?"

If swarms of midlevel reporters were making this exodus instead of senior aces, I might draw that conclusion. But Harris, VandeHei, and Von Drehle have been bid away for top dollar, which makes it hard to view them as survivors awaiting rescue.

Both Harris and VandeHei said that they viewed the career move more as a chance to create a "multiplatform news organization from scratch" than an indictment of the Post, or of print journalism in general.

“This is not a statement about the Post,” Mr. VandeHei said. “It’s about having a rare opportunity to be given what it takes to build your dream news organization.”

The Post had planned to use these men to "expand its political coverage and capitalize on an intense interest in politics with the Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill and the 2008 presidential campaign," which will have to be reconfigured after their departures.

Shafer ultimately believes that the departure of Harris and VandeHei speak to a journalistic idealism that longs to be a part of something ground-breaking.

They want editors to climb up on desks and tell them how the elections have cleaned the slates up on Capitol Hill and that with new leadership installed in both parties, the journalistic game has been reset. They want their editors to tell them that in the Internet era, politics doesn't belong to the Post anymore: It's up for grabs.