Leiby: D.C. Harder To Work In Than Baghdad

It’s Thursday, which means Richard Leiby wasted an hour talking nonsense to crazy loons fans in a WP.com chat today. If you really can’t get enough of the Reliable Source (and really, who can?), CampusProgress.org did a brief interview with him earlier this week.

Amid repeated questioning on the difficulty of writing a gossip column at the World’s Most Serious Newspaper (excluding perhaps the Gray Lady herself), Leiby said “I always point out that we appear on page 3 of the Washington Post Style section, which is half of page 6. So you’re only getting half of the actual gossip content that you would in a New York tabloid. Political content is a current that runs through everything in Washington. So our gossip tends not to be overwhelmingly sexy.”

And as for taking the gossip job that he’s happily abandoning later this spring? Leiby laments “Little did I realize that it would be harder to work in the D.C. social circuit than in Baghdad.”

MEDIABISTRO EVENTS

Get Social Media Marketing Secrets from Experts

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.