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

If only they'd drop the registration

[Eevee]

I would start reading them. Instead, I keep going back to the BBC.

Re:If only they'd drop the registration

[timeOday]

"If only they'd drop the registration, I would start reading them."

Shouldn't you be posting that as an Anonymous Coward?

Serious Conversation

[Kesch]

'The news, as "lecture," is giving way to the news as a "conversation".

I suggest we discuss this new news paradigm.

'Kaiser memo

[Kesch]

For those who don't RTFA, you really should read the text of the 'Kaiser memo for a good chuckle.

"The Post is not in a pot of water, and we're smarter than the average frog, but we do find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured -- or ignored as an unnecessary anachronism. Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting boiled as the electronic revolution continues."

Now, I think the fundamental problem with this metaphor is that frogs have no business swimming in the sea, electronic or otherwise. That should be left to select e-turtles.

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.

The rise of wire services

[NewsWatcher]

The rise of the internet news over newspaper has meant far more than just a different format for the delivery of news. It has meant that far more than in the past news is being delivered by wire services like Reuters, AP, AFP etc. This is fine as far as it goes, but as wire services can deliver news cheaply to many different sites, it makes for some pretty uniform coverage of many events. Websites can't afford to send their own reporters, so are increasingly relying on the wires to do the leg work for them. Just take a look at Google News any day of the week to see how many of the stories are exactly the same. I love reading my favourite news online, but I rue the day that great newspapers become a conduit for delivering the wires withough delving into the investigative pieces that truly change society.

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'?

Only once?

[Eevee]

That would be once for my laptop, once for my desktop system, once for my primary machine at work, once for the kiosk in the server room, twice for the kiosks in the lab...all being redone every time I clean out the cookies.

But the problem is it's not just the Post. There's all these newspapers doing it. Repeatedly, I've had people send me links to what I would assume are interesting stories...only to be hit with a registration page. If I'm not willing to put up with the hassle for my local paper, I'm sure not going to bother for the West Bumfuck Tribune out of Idaho. CNN, Fox News(1), ABC News, even MSNBC aren't doing registrations, so guess who gets my traffic.

------------------

(1) Yeah, like I'd really follow Fox News.

Re:Only once?

[NanoGator]

"That would be once for my laptop, once for my desktop system, once for my primary machine at work, once for the kiosk in the server room, twice for the kiosks in the lab..."

It'd be once for the machine you're reading the story on. Don't be dramatic. :P

"If I'm not willing to put up with the hassle for my local paper, I'm sure not going to bother for the West Bumfuck Tribune out of Idaho. CNN, Fox News(1), ABC News, even MSNBC aren't doing registrations, so guess who gets my traffic."

Okay... so you're unwilling to type in some garbage to get through the reg page, instead preferring to go hunting for the story (if it's even there) on one of the other 4 sites that you've mentioned.

You know, I can understand some of the annoyance here. I work across 3 different machines every day. I'm not oblvious to the problems you're mentioning. But, man, I just don't understand the panty-bunching about it on Slashdot. By the time you've spent that (minimum of) 20 seconds typing that comment, you would have been in already.

Re:Only once?

[bheer]

Mandatory registration definitely sucks, but IMO you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

> The BBC is one of the best mainstream news sites out there and in general the idiots who think their news is worth mandatory registration for just that

The BBC can afford to do that because every UK television-owning household is paying for it -- over $250 a year IIRC. And a lot of them do chafe at what they're getting in the bargain. And if you think the BBC doesn't have an agenda, you're seriously deluded. (That doesn't mean the BBC doesn't run good stories, but that people who think 'the Beeb' is the be-all and end-all of news are unknowningly trapping themselves into the BBC's worldview without even knowing it.)

Me, I'll continue to get my news from the maximum number of sources that's feasible for me. And frankly, I do my newsreading on my laptop (why would I be looking for news in the server room at work?) so it's simply not a big deal.

I still subscribe to the paper version...

[Omega]

Not sure about everyone else, but I still subscribe to the paper New York Times. I read it on the way into work, I read it in the hammock in the back yard, I read it in Starbucks. Having the electronic version available is great if I want to copy or reference something on my computer, but as far as "getting" my news goes, its still the paper version for me.

best quote from the article

[RobertLTux]

"We learned a major lesson -- neither your server nor your vendor should be so far away that you can't kick them."

My own paradigm shift

[bfwebster]

I lived in Washington DC from July 1996 to August 1998, then from December 1999 to August 2005--a total of about seven years. During all that time, I subscribed to both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal; both would come every morning by 6 am, and I would eat breakfast standing up and going through both papers pretty thoroughly--paging through every section, scanning headlines, reading articles that interested me. I did this in spite of reviewing an increasing number of on-line news sites and blogs each day.

I moved to Parker, Colorado, in August 2005. Parker is about 25 miles from downtown Denver. My WSJ delivery shifted from early morning to coming in the mail--which meant that I got each day's edition in the afternoon, if I got it at all (sometimes it wouldn't come until the next day). I didn't even try to get the WP; instead, I signed up for a 'weekend' subscription to the Rocky Mountain News (largely for movie listings). And when my WSJ subscription came up for renewal, I let it lapse for this simple reason: by the time the WSJ came and I had a chance to read it, I had already been exposed to most of the news stories that interested me via the web.

I now have in my bookmarks roughly 140 news, information, commentary and blog sites, all of which I review at least once a day, and about 25% of which I review multiple times a day. I miss having the Post and the WSJ at my door before 6 am each morning; navigating their web sites is not as easy as reading the newspaper, and could I get them here that early, I would still subscribe to both, even at the combined rate of $200-300/year. But getting the WSJ in mid-afternoon just isn't worth it, and the Post would be even more delayed. So after a lifetime of reading newspapers (I'm 53), I've largely given up on them. ..bruce..

Re:My own paradigm shift

[.com b4 .storm]

I now have in my bookmarks roughly 140 news, information, commentary and blog sites, all of which I review at least once a day

Congratulations! You officially have no life! :)

Re:First Newspaper on the Web

[prockcore]

The Icelandic morning newspaper, Morgunblaðið started their online edition in 1995 i think.

The Arizona Daily Star launched May 5th 1995.

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.