But, as The Los Angeles Times pointed out, at least two of the invitations to political participants, Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, came from the personal e-mail address of Ms. Weymouth. Mr. Brauchli insisted that he had not realized the full implications of the events even though Mr. Pelton told The Post’s ombudsman that the plan was “well developed with the newsroom.”

The absence of a credible explanation, compounded a grievous wound to an important newspaper. The whole episode suggests a misreading of history that has been well covered by the paper but also, and perhaps worse, a tin ear to newsroom dynamics.

Let’s put this in context: Ms. Weymouth is confronted with the same crisis as every publisher in the country. The Web has robbed newspapers of paying readers and advertisers, the economic downturn is cutting into what is left, and smaller, nimbler Internet competitors are learning to slake the 24-hour news thirst on their own.

(The fact that it was Politico that broke this story only added to the sting. Started by two former Post reporters, Politico has become a serious competitor right on The Post’s inside-the-Beltway turf, and now has caught the paper on a fundamental lapse in the wall between church and state. In the increasingly heated race between the mainstream media and newer, digitally enabled ones, much of the remaining competitive edge for legacy media derives from a perception that they adhere to more rigorous publishing standards. Oops.)

So Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli are under tremendous pressure to innovate, both to cut costs and to increase revenue. Unfortunately, neither arrive at this critical point for the industry with much equity in the newsroom they lead, because they are both relatively new.

Ms. Weymouth has some inherited good will in part because she leads an organization that is not only family-owned but is also operated like a family. When Donald Graham was the publisher (and Bo Jones, who succeeded him) and Leonard Downie Jr. was the editor, they were both viewed as tradition-bound  boring even  but they both observed The Post tradition of winning over employees, not bossing them around.