Yesterday, Katharine Weymouth, the most-watched woman in newspaper publishing today, announced that Marcus Brauchli, the former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal who took a package rather than tangle with the Murdoch machine taking over his newsroom, will become the new executive editor of the Washington Post. In making the selection of an outsider to the Post, Weymouth has set a long-term course for a paper that, like the rest of the newspaper industry, is under assault from the Internet, diminishing advertising and circulation revenue as well as cost increases and environmental concerns. 

In the five short months since Katharine Weymouth assumed the publisher’s spot at her family’s vaunted Washington Post, she has become the highest-ranking woman working at one of the prestige dailies. The granddaughter of the widely respected Katharine Graham, who along with Ben Bradlee steered the paper through its famed Watergate days, Weymouth is taking the reins at a cataclysmic time in the newspaper industry. The media world is watching to see if she will be able to steer the paper and its Internet operations to a kind of profitability that so far has eluded both the scions of old-line newspaper families such as Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at the New York Times as well as cocky newcomers such as real-estate entrepreneur Sam Zell, the new CEO at the Tribune Company, owners of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

For more, see The New York Times’s coverage of the announcement.