• Vanity Fair, Monday, September 7, 2009 10:55 PM

If you had to look for a circumstance out of which a newspaper might have the chance to re-invent itself, The Washingon Post would be a pretty good candidate, writes Michael Wolff. Washington Post Company owns Stanley Kaplan, the S.A.T.-study company, which now supports the place.

At the same time, Katharine Weymouth's elevation from advertising director to publisher could be a newspaper's worst nightmare: the attenuated scion, full of cost-cutting and business-model zeal, with almost no sense of the soul of the enterprise. Instead, there is a sense that she is sacrificing herself by taking on a job that can't be done. If the paper goes down, she goes down.

It could more logically be someone from Kaplan, the much future-directed part of the enterprise, who gets to lead the Post Company as an education business rather than a news business. The future could be a much smaller paper, an online operation and probably a much less vaunted role for the Graham family in Washington. In a sense, the Grahams are managing, and financing, their own demise. They will not be the first family of news in the nation's capital anymore.

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