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Washington Post Reviews its 10 Years on the Web

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jun 19, 2006 06:22 PM
from the i-also-collect-spores-molds-and-fungus dept.
The Media The Internet
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."
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  • If only they'd drop the registration (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eevee (535658) on Monday June 19 2006, @06:24PM (#15565398)
    I would start reading them. Instead, I keep going back to the BBC.
    • "I would start reading them. Instead, I keep going back to the BBC."

      Yeesh, you only gotta do it once. They don't even validate the email address. That's what cookies are for, lazypants. :P

      • Only once? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Eevee (535658) on Monday June 19 2006, @06:59PM (#15565568)

        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? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by NanoGator (522640) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:24PM (#15565683) Homepage Journal
          "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.

          • 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.

            It's not 20 seconds, it's 2 minutes times however news sites you read across however many computers you read your news on times however often your cookies get cleared times the small loss in privacy times the number of spam-target email addresses it's necessary to create and remember passwords for times however many broken re

            • 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. (Tha
          • If all news spawned from the same source, sure. Every newspaper site, it seems, wants to mine your data, and force you to do a registration for it. One or two times, it's managable (I've done it for the NY Times, I think that's it - and that was part of a school project that I had no way around), but for every flipping newspaper's website is insane. I suppose if they're listed on bugmenot.com I'm not especially bothered, but I'd rather not be spammed by a hundred news sites, let alone remember whether th
          • That's why "BugmeNot" is one of the greatest extensions ever created. I click on a link, get confronted by a reg page, right click, down to BugmeNot, and I'm in.

            3 seconds.
          • By the time you've spent that (minimum of) 20 seconds typing that comment, you would have been in already.

            But every time someone says "Screw it" and doesn't register, their web stats will record someone who reached the registration page, but gave up before making it through to see their news and their banner ads (and any business worth its salt should be examining viewing patterns). Enough of that, and they will conform to a less annoying policy. Nearly every news article is in a few dozen sources anyway,
        • The solution: Google Browser Sync Be sure to encrypt everything
      • Yeesh, you only gotta do it once. They don't even validate the email address. That's what cookies are for, lazypants. :P

        Why should I have to do it at all? Do they want me to view their advertisements or don't they?

    • Re:If only they'd drop the registration (Score:5, Funny)

      by timeOday (582209) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:33PM (#15565715)
      "If only they'd drop the registration, I would start reading them."
      Shouldn't you be posting that as an Anonymous Coward?
    • I hear the BugMeNot firefox extension [roachfiend.com] is helpful for reading articles.
    • Same here.

      I know there are going to be people crawling out of the woodwork to give how many seconds it takes to create a new registration for a particular site, but honestly I'm just not interested. I have to remember enough usernames and passwords as it is already, I don't need to remember another half dozen or two for my news sites.

      Google News seems to be pretty good about finding stories from no-reg-required sites, and it's easy enough if you click a link and end up at a registration page just to back up
    • A coupla years ago when I lived and worked in DC there was an ever-smiling WaPo employee named Sheldon. He used to stand in front of the Van Dorn metro station, rain or shine, probably still does, handing out the free dumbed-down weekly-reader edition of the WaPo. Now I would save trees and metro cleanup costs by reading the paper on my smartphone. I would tease Sheldon. "Sheldon, don't you want to know my date of birth?" He looked at me like I was crazy. "If I give you my email address, can I have a

  • Serious Conversation (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kesch (943326) on Monday June 19 2006, @06:27PM (#15565414)
    'The news, as "lecture," is giving way to the news as a "conversation".

    I suggest we discuss this new news paradigm.
    • With camera crews now able to broadcast live from anywhere on the planet, news has become the ultimate reality TV show. There's far less interest in capturing and analyzing real facts and far more on sound-bites, dramatic backdrops and other creative content to up viewership.
  • So, which was the first print newspaper to have a website? A dialup bulletin board type thing (digital ink) doesn't count.

  • 'Kaiser memo (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kesch (943326) on Monday June 19 2006, @06:36PM (#15565467)
    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.
    • The metaphor refers to an old story about an odd behavior in frogs. If you attempt to place a frog in a pot of hot water it will try to escape, if you place that same frog in a pot of cool water and slowly heat it up to a boil, the frog will supposedly make no attempt to leave.

  • Not the first, not by a longshot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobertB-DC (622190) * on Monday June 19 2006, @06:37PM (#15565469) Homepage Journal
    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 [star-telegram.com], with help from some local techies [radioshack.com], produced "the world's first electronic newspaper" in 1982!

    From the usual source [wikipedia.org]:
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NewsWatcher (450241) on Monday June 19 2006, @06:45PM (#15565509)
    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.

    • I still subscribe to the paper version... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Omega (1602) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:04PM (#15565593) Homepage
      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.
      • I used to subscribe to a paper (and before that, I bought it out of the machine where I used to live, almost every day), but now I just buy it irregularly on the weekends because I can't find the time to read it.

        Compared to pulling open another window on my computer's screen and typing in a Web address, actually carrying around a paper and futzing around with flipping pages seems like a lot of work. I'm sure that sounds like the height of laziness (and I suppose I could easily imagine the reverse situation:
    • There is one overwhelming plus to internet news replacing newspapers. Manufacturing newsprint for newspapers is a single handed ecological disaster. Bowater, one of the biggest U.S. producers produced 2.7 million metric tons of newsprint in 2005. Trees the world over will breath a sigh of relief if the Internet replaces newspapers.

      Now we just need to get rid of coal fired power plants to generate the electricity we need for our computers, and come up with readers that actually work as well as newspapers
        • Its not like you are paying for the coupons by buying the newspaper. The companies who make them should be delighted at the prospect of putting them online and making you use your expensive color printer ink to print them. They can easily rig and restrict them so you can't abuse them. They just overcharge the people without the coupons and make a slightly smaller profit on the people that do use them.

          There must be some marketing rationale for coupons, but me personally I hate the whole idea, especially s

    • The wire services are a big part of what I see as the problem. I understand that not every paper can keep up with the NYT and such, but so many news casts and papers and sites are so close to straight wire service copies it's insane. It doesn't cost a fortune to send an article across the world. News papers could team up (like sister papers).

      There are other things that drive me off. What I see as a very clear bias is one thing. This is both a political bias (most outlets are liberal to varying degrees, alt

      • Reporting on good news is nothing more than glorified human interest bullshit. What's the point? All the viewer can do is just vaguely acknowledge it and move on. "Yeah, it sure is good that thing happened."

        Furthermore, why the hell should a person care about local news? Given the choice between a story that effects a the entire world and a story which effects one percent of one percent of the world, I think it's obvious which story is more important.
      • As you may note from my nic, I am a more than casual consumer of the media. I have been working as a journalist for 11 years. I have worked for newspaper, wire services, websites and on radio. You are correct in saying there has been a general rise in the use of wires in news print as well. The difference is that so many internet sites want to have 24-hour coverage, which papers don't traditionally offer. The only way they can be expected to do this without costs blowing out is by utilising wire services. I
  • I'd like to see the electronic newspaper that people read in the Minority Report. You know, headlines appear on the front page as they happen. Advertisements are geared towards your interests, flashes and bulletins interrupt your reading and it's all done wirelessly. Who says you have to have an input device to read articles on the net?

  • Wapo is pretty good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by esconsult1 (203878) on Monday June 19 2006, @06:59PM (#15565565) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by maelstrom (638) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:11PM (#15565624) Homepage Journal
      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'?
      • who is really going to pay for yet more random pontification from a supposed 'expert'?

        It's not really the expertise of the op-ed columnist per se. The columnists serve, more often than you'd think, as a kind of conduit for ex-big shots, real experts, and government insiders who want to leak their analyses. The op-ed columnist gets to pass it off as their own insight, and it end up a win-win situation for the both.

        • Most of the people writing editorials in the NYTimes have no special qualifications. Yes, it takes more time and more thought to find voices on blogs that you can trust, but ultimately if you are deciding that the editors of the NY Times are better just because they were hired by the NY Times you probably have bigger problems.
    • <rant>

      I just cancelled my print subscription recently.

      I found that their printing of unconfirmed rumors regarding Haditha, for which investigations are still ongoing, on the front page above the fold on 26May to be reprehensible yellow journalism.

      To be sure, the issue is grave, and bears full disclosure, without coverups.

      The US armed forces deserve to be both accountable, and innocent until proven guilty.

      WaPo's wet-blanket read on the subsequent snuffing of Al-Zarqawi was the proverbial straw.

      These Wa

  • Don't celebrate the death of the MSM (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:00PM (#15565570) Homepage
    The alternative [tcsdaily.com] is even worse, and it ain't bloggers.
  • "We learned a major lesson -- neither your server nor your vendor should be so far away that you can't kick them."

  • News as 'conversation'? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ScentCone (795499) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:25PM (#15565685)
    But that's exactly what's wrong with so many news-ish web sites. I don't want to have to wade through an unqualified conversation about facts and events, I simply want the facts. At least on slashdot there is a moderation system, and a pretty good understanding of the prevailing local culture - that means that when I want a "conversation" about the news, I can come and get one. Or go elsewhere. For a hoot, I could go to Drudge as a springboard to all sorts of spun conversations.

    But a first rate "news" source (like the front page of the WP) shouldn't require me to wonder who is conversing with whom, that particular day. The Washington Post is my "local" paper, here in suburban Maryland. My gut sense, having read the paper for over 30 years, is that the web-based conversation they are now hosting has been eroding their editorial spine. Ironically, I've traditionally disliked their editorial positions - but they were consistent, and I had a sense of how that was going to shape their coverage decisions. Now, they seem to be thrashing around quite a bit.

  • My own paradigm shift (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bfwebster (90513) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:29PM (#15565701) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by .com b4 .storm (581701) on Monday June 19 2006, @07:53PM (#15565790)

      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! :)

      • 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! :)
        Well, yeah, my friends and relatives have known that for years. :-) ..bruce..
    • I can feel your pain. I currently live in Silver Spring. I get the NY Times every morning and pick up the WSJ and WP from time to time when I come across it. I prefer reading the newspaper to trying to figure out what to bother to read on the websites. This is especially true because the websites will be updated frequently and I find myself reading an article that isn't really worth the little bit of update it provides. I do enjoy some specific blogs and alternative news sites. I try to discipline myself to
  • Reminds me of a minister leading off a church newsletter by saying "Some feel that the church is old-fashioned in today's modern fast-paced world, but starting next month we are going to make use of contemporary technology to spread the Good News and help parishioners stay in touch. Yes, we are going to put a up what is known as 'web site' on the international communications system known as the Internat. Any one with a 'modem' will be able to 'download' our newsletters. It is not so different from the letters Paul used to communicate with the early churches, but instead of ink and paper we will use electrons moving at the speed of light."

  • The Post website is sad. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by massysett (910130) on Monday June 19 2006, @08:31PM (#15565929) Homepage
    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.

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