Washington Post Reviews its 10 Years on the Web

anaesthetica writes "The Washington Post is featuring three stories today reviewing their experience in adapting the "old media" to the new environment of the web. The first article examines their revelation that 'The news, as "lecture," is giving way to the news as a "conversation".' The second looks at the 'Kaiser memo' which served as the germinating point for what would become WashingtonPost.com, phrased in language that today seems amusingly quaint. The final article looks at the death of traditional print newspapers as consumers flock to internet sources for their news."

Comments

Not the first, not by a longshot

[RobertB-DC]

It was August 1992. There were no wireless laptops, no BlackBerries, no blogs, no rush to flip on cell phones as soon as your plane hit the runway. Yet, in his hand-written memo, sparked after attending an Apple-organized conference in Hakone, Japan, Kaiser took a peek into a crystal ball of technology and proposed that the company "design the world's first electronic newspaper."

1992? What a joke! The folks at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, with help from some local techies, produced "the world's first electronic newspaper" in 1982!

From the usual source:

StarText was an online ASCII-based computer service that was officially launched on May 3, 1982 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Tandy Corporation. Its name was derived from Star representing the newspaper which would provide the content and Text representing the computer company which would provide the technology.

StarText was marketed in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex newspaper circulation area of North Texas, USA. It quickly evolved into an electronic magazine written by unpaid journalists who had paid to be subscribers of the service. Its eventual demise came with the growth of the Internet. In May of 1996 an additional Internet service was offered and called StarText. Net with the original service being rebranded as StarText Classic. The original service finally closed down on March 3, 1997 and in June of 1998, StarText. Net morphed into Star-Telegram Online Services which in turn eventually became a conventional online Internet service of the Knight-Ridder group.

1992... we had y'all beat by ten years.

Wapo is pretty good

[esconsult1]

As a New Yorker, I started out reading mostly the New York Times. However Wapo has consistently led in innovations in the industry. Coupled with their world class journalism, blogs, all kinds of reader feedback, and most importantly -- leaving the content free, has let me to turn to them as must read on my long list of news sources each morning.

The NY Times has walled off their editorial and I have seen my interest in the paper slowly wane.

Happy 10 years Wapo!

Re:Wapo is pretty good

[maelstrom]

Yeah, the NYTimes started losing me when they walled off their editorial section. After awhile I didn't miss it at all, in the age of the blogger who is really going to pay for yet more random pontification from a supposed 'expert'?

The Post website is sad.

[massysett]

The Washington Post is an excellent newspaper with an outstanding editorial staff. It's a shame that their website wastes the paper's editorial resources.

Start with the home page. It's impossible to scan the thing. There are a few big stories at the top of the page, and then the bottom of the page falls into a huge morass of links arranged in multiple columns. The eye gets lost in this junkpile, and the little five-word headlines generally provide no context for the stories. Why don't these guys look at online-only news sites, like CNET News.com or Yahoo News? They're much better organized and easier to scan for interesting news.

Bad layout isn't all that's bad about the website though. Take the ads for example. You'd think that with the registration data they demand from users, they could serve targeted, useful ads. Nope--instead I always get the same ads for mortgage refinancing--how useful for an apartment dweller. Or you'd think that they could use the content of the news stories to serve up targeted ads--wouldn't advertisers pay a lot for that? If I'm reading, say, a story about computers, serve up computer ads; or if I'm reading Steve Barr's "Federal Diary" column, serve up ads for federal employees' health insurance? Hasn't the Post learned anything from Google? Nope--it's always the mortgage refinancing ads. And these guys wonder why they're not making any money on the Web?

Useless ads wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so irritating. All the Post's pages are littered with ads. They figure that annoying pop-ups aren't enough, so recently they started these irritating Flash ads that creep out, seizing a third of your browser window before receding. Are they trying to make it annoying? Is that what they've learned from powerhouse ad sellers like Google--annoying ads work? Did they really make that much money selling X10 camera ads?

I look at the Post website because they still have the best local DC coverage. I avoid the Post website for anything else--sure, the Post covers the White House the best, but the AP does almost as good a job and I can get their stuff on the annoyance-free Yahoo News. The Post is intent on annoying its users with cluttered pages and as long as that's the case, craigslist and Google will eat them alive in the online world.