Today, however, news organizations have to be cutting-edge IT companies.

In January, it was a 25-cent increase in the cover price, from 75 cents to $1, that just suddenly appeared one day. (Home subscribers got a price increase too, although it was noted in the mailed bills.)

To me, the best predictor of Romney as president is not as the former Bain Capital chief executive, but as the former governor of Massachusetts.

On Tuesday, below the fold on Page A3, The Post ran a story from its reporter on national financial and fiscal matters, Lori Montgomery, about a new study of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, derisively called Obamacare but known among policy wonks as the ACA.

The Post did that on Monday this week, publishing on page A8 a photograph of a Tibetan exile who set himself afire in New Delhi to protest Chinese rule in Tibet.

And sometimes that can lead to mistakes, such as the caption on a photo that appeared on page B5 of Wednesday’s paper in the Metro section. The photo was of D.C. City Council member (and former Mayor) Marion Barry waiting in line to vote in his Southeast Washington ward, a picture shot earlier in the day.

The first sour note was in the lead sentence: “The shooter was once a Catholic altar boy — with a surname that could have been Jewish.”

Paying for online or digital content (called a “paywall” in media jargon) is much in the news right now because this month has seen several headlines on the subject: The New York Times’ digital fee system had its first birthday, and the paper reduced from 20 to 10 the number of free stories you can view per month before you have to pay; the Los Angeles Times launched its digital “membership program” on March 5; and the Gannett Co. announced that its array of 80 regional newspapers — but not its flagship paper USA Today — will begin charging for online content by the end of the year. So why not The Post?

Caw, caw, caw, crunch! That’s the sound of me eating crow. It’s not the most pleasant repast I’ve had — the feathers don’t go down so easy — but it is a necessary one.

I did a blog post this past Friday that was dismissive, snarky and wrongheaded, and had factual errors too. And I apologize to readers for it and I’ll try to repair some of the damage here.

But to properly determine who did what in the multi-year, organic development of electronic messaging would take a fleet of patent lawyers months and years to sort out.

All the hysteria revolves around a steamy photograph that appeared with Joel Achenbach’s Valentine’s Day essay, “Sweet Mystery,” on the many facets of love and what they mean. The story appeared on the cover of Style, and the photo that made a few people hot and bothered appeared inside with the rest of the story on Page C9.

It’s early yet — I won’t know for several weeks who or how many will be leaving. The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, which represents many employees here, gets a chance to weigh in on the terms of the buyout, then the paperwork comes out, and then Post employees have 45 days to decide.

That was the headline on a January 30 blog post on The Fix, the Post’s very popular politics blog, by reporters Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake. The post was based on a Gallup study of the average gap between poll respondents in each party who approve of how a president is doing his job in any given year.

So it was this week with the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973 and the accompanying March for Life that has taken place here every January since.

Obama was on a post-State-of-the-Union tour around the country to tout his ideas and stopped off in Phoenix to visit an Intel factory. He was greeted at the airport by Brewer and other Arizona elected officials, as is normal, and there ensued an animated discussion between the two chief executives in which Brewer pointed her finger at the president.

“See, you liberal media nincompoops, this is all your fault, you treated Obama like a saint when he was running in 2007 and 2008 and you didn’t vet him, investigate him, report on him skeptically. You were so fawning (and adoring of his blackness), you missed that he was a (pick your adjective), radical, socialist, Muslim, inexperienced, dangerous, corrupt, weak Chicago politician with no track record of accomplishment, whose only talent is giving speeches.”

It raised its single-copy price at the newsstand to $1, from 75 cents, and the company did so with no announcement, no publisher’s note, nothing online or in print that I could find.

Whether it was the anti-pipeline protest in November, in which demonstrators linked arms to ring the White House, or the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally last January, which attracts a quarter-million people and almost no coverage, readers and the participants themselves say this most basic function of democracy — petitioning the government for a redress of grievances — is something The Post should cover more thoroughly as the capital’s leading newspaper.

Such was the case when The Post used the word “motley” to describe the GOP presidential candidates in a headline on the “jump,” or continuation page, of a front-page story on the Iowa caucuses that ran on Jan. 3.

Hardly a week goes by without the Web site or newspaper launching some feature, or a venture to attract more revenue, or a blog, or a social media innovation. Just since I have been here, The Post has redesigned its Web site; installed a new content management system; pioneered the Facebook social reader, which tracks and announces what your Facebook friends are reading; added a team of policy bloggers to Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog; revised its comment system for readers; added a ton more news videos online; started The Root DC, a site aimed at African American readers; and probably about 10 other things I can’t remember.

Eugene Robinson got in hot water not for a column he wrote, but for an appearance on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” during which he described former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum as “very weird” for some of his anti-abortion and anti-gay positions and for how the senator and his wife, Karen, handled the death in 1996 of their baby, Gabriel.

I got an earful. Maybe 10 earfuls. These leaders, all in the Federation of Citizens Associations of the District of Columbia, represent every northwest neighborhood from Crestwood to Georgetown. This was a largely white crowd and not representative of the city as a whole. But collectively, the activists have several hundred years of knowledge of this city’s neighborhoods and its government.

Not a word about any of these cities appeared in the Nov. 9 or Nov. 10 print editions of The Washington Post. And very little appeared online on election night or the next day. The cities are all in Maryland, four of them in the jurisdiction that complains almost constantly of being ignored by The Post: Prince George’s County.

The taste level of one Post photograph was offensive to some readers.

The circle-the-White House protest last Sunday over the TransCanada oil pipeline didn’t get enough coverage.