When Marcus Brauchli succeeds Leonard Downie as the executive editor of The Washington Post on Sept. 8, he will be the first new leader there in 17 years. Just how Brauchli manages the enormous challenges facing the paper will reveal much about the future of American newspapers and journalism in general.

When Downie ascended to the post in 1991, among the main concerns of the newspaper were to improve its local coverage, deal with its liberal image and compete with The New York Times. Ah, if only Brauchli's problems were that simple. Today, what the 47-year-old former top editor of The Wall Street Journal must navigate is more akin to monastic scribes handling the invention of the printing press or European monarchs responding to the concept of democracy.

The first and most important issue for Brauchli is to help Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (a granddaughter of Katharine Graham) monetize the paper's Web site. Like many dailies across the country, the Post's print readership is shrinking while its Web audience is growing. Its site has nearly 9 million unique visitors every month, compared with sales of about 673,000 copies of the paper each day. Yet only about 10 percent of the paper's revenue comes from the Web. Compounding the problem is that the Post's readership is largely based in Washington, D.C., while its Web audience is international. That means the economic model for the two platforms may need to be quite separate.

Fortunately, Brauchli will have some advantages to work with. The Post is a Web innovator with a strong site. Weymouth comes from the online world. The company is also deeply committed, has relatively deep pockets and has a lot of patience. The Post is a likely leader in deciphering a new economic model online. If Brauchli and Weymouth cannot succeed, the industry itself may not. (NEWSWEEK is owned by The Washington Post Co.)

Key to that is finding a solution to Brauchli's second problem: how to unify the culture of the Web site operation, based in Virginia, and the print operation, based in downtown Washington. The two newsrooms are not just separated physically but culturally and psychologically, as well. This problem is not unique to the Post. A good many newspapers have cultural schisms between online and print. Some of this is generational. Some of it is more subtle, a tension between a writers' culture and a multimedia and programming culture. Nor is it limited to the newsroom. The business sides of newspapers have had even more trouble generally embracing the Web. The problems at the Post, however, appear especially acute. Feudal politics has already scuttled some efforts at innovation, including one involving creating community microsites.

The third challenge Brauchli faces is more peculiar to the Post. Great papers of national rank—a small and perhaps shrinking list—generally do not go outside for leaders. With more resources, larger papers are able to shepherd potential leaders through stints on the foreign, national and investigative assignments. When top editors are imported from outside at such papers, it's generally a sign of internal problems. By hiring Brauchli, Weymouth is signaling there may indeed be something to worry about at the Post.

That probably won't come as a surprise to Brauchli or anyone else in the industry. Many people at the Post sense that the paper's culture is troubled. One insider described the place this week to me as "dysfunctional." Another Post writer and editor, one of the paper's most esteemed, told me that the paper seems to be "sort of imploding," with some of the biggest names more committed to books, TV and other endeavors than to the daily publication of the paper. Brauchli is going to have to win over those distracted heavy hitters. History suggests trying to change newspapers from above, without winning over senior staff, generally tends to fail.

All of this, in the end, likely turns back to the first challenge—economics. If Brauchli and Weymouth can win here, the whole industry, not just Post stalwarts, will cheer. In Weymouth, Brauchli has a publisher who seems committed to the inevitable truth of technology: the next generation of readers, if there is one, will be online. There is no future if that is not realized. And the Post, with family control, a commitment to quality and subsidies from other businesses to help, is as well situated to the test as anyone left in the business.

Longtime media critic Tom Rosenstiel is director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, D.C., a research group that studies the performance of the media. He was chief congressional correspondent at NEWSWEEK in 1995 and 1996.