Newspapers: Expansionist Spree in Washington

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"This place is overorganized," complains a Washington Post newsman. "Too many new people are running around doing God knows what."

They may not all know what they are doing, but their frenetic activity is paying off handsomely for the Post. By financing an uninhibited hiring spree, Kay Graham, 49, has pumped new life into the paper she took over from her husband Philip after his suicide in 1963.

Post circulation — now 456,000 — has been climbing steadily since 1954, when it bought Colonel McCormick's Times-Herald and became a morning monopoly. In ad linage, the paper ranks third in the nation, behind only the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. "I don't play girl editor," says Mrs. Graham, who has demonstrated a knack for putting the right person in the right job.

"I don't tell people what to do all the time. I'm interested in finding people, developing them, giving them leeway and backing them up."

Freed from Routine. She has done all that and more for her new managing editor, Benjamin Bradlee, 45, whom she took from his post as Newsweek's Washington bureau chief in 1965.

Faced with a somewhat stodgy paper, Bradlee ordered a brisk series of changes. To replace the rambling, disorganized pieces that often glutted Page One, he prescribed straightforward news stories that come quickly to the point.

He prodded his reporters out of their clock-watching work habits and freed them from routine beats. Today a Post man is encouraged to pursue a story wherever it leads without worrying about stepping on a colleague's toes.

Even before Bradlee arrived, the Post's international news coverage had begun to show marked improvement; it has had an expanded foreign staff to call on ever since 1962, when it set up a joint news service with the Los Angeles Times. But the glamour of the big stories — whether national politics or events abroad — does not distract from home-town coverage. Post reporters track down local stories from the city's southwest slums to the bedroom suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

The result is a paper in which Washingtonians can read just about all the news—local, national and international. The trouble is, say many critics, that the news is often hard to find. The Post has yet to solve the manifold problems of makeup, especially on its ad-rich back pages. A story on the treatment of U.S. prisoners of war in North Viet Nam, for example, may well be lost among the food ads.

Psyche Killer. Such problems are compounded as Bradlee hires more talent to file more stories. With Kay Graham's backing, he has raided other newspapers and magazines. His catch includes the New York Times's crack Political Reporter David S. Broder and the Saturday Evening Post's Stanley Karnow, whom Bradlee has sent to roam Southeast Asia. Nicholas von Hoffman was brought to town from the Chicago Daily News and now travels from one ghetto to the next to assess the miseries of slum life. Hired from the New Republic, Wolf von Eckardt provides some of the most perceptive daily-newspaper comment on city planning.