Insight Into Media - 1 Washington Post

Hi everyone

I am starting a series of writeups -- kicking off with this one -- on how newspapers and media houses in different parts of the world are facing the challenges posed by new technologies and using them to their advantage

These points and projections emerged at the WAN-IFRA 2011 conference held in Chennai from September 6 to 8.

Of special interest is the way in which the new media are tapped to give the new generation of readers added values that supplement newspaper efforts – and fetch the media revenues.

Your valuable comments and suggestions are welcome so that these could be taken up by the media owners and journalists at meetings or conferences in future.


Kirubanidhi
Senior Asst. Editor
The Hindu
Chennai

Email: journo1958@gmail.com
Cellphone: 0(if calling from outside Chennai) 9281342829

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Insight into media 1

How The Washington Post meets challenges


Washington Post Managing Editor Raju Narisetti, in his September 7 speech at the WAN-IFRA 2011 conference, gave a brief overview of how the newspaper’s 24-hour integrated newsroom is meeting the challenges daily.

The key challenge for him, when he took over the top post, was tackling mismatched skillsets. He revamped editorial systems and streamlined workflows. Some job cuts were inevitable. There was a need to popularise the editorial team with search, social media and web traffic experts.

Information relating to news stories were made available to all journalists on hourly, mid-day and real time alert basis. These included page views of visitors to the news sites and time spent on stories by them. This helped more engagement of audience.

Training and re-training of the journalists happen on a continual basis.

Blogs are used to build off stories. The blog about an Obama impersonator at a party meeting was a huge hit and about 10 million people read them.

The Post realised that it is not enough to publish news but you have to make it more engaging by good packaging. They were happy to note that there was more feedback with one story garnering 3,000 comments.

Personalisation of news is important to engage the audience. The Post embraced Facebook and Twitter and now had 800 million fans on FB. Newsletter emails are sent to 1.5 million readers.

The revamping helped the Post to get back their readers and occupy the number two slot in terms of readership. The time spent on the news site improved and it occupied the number slot now.

The good news for India, Narisetti said, is that time is in its favour to catch up and they need to do this by “measuring things up, setting goals, and rewarding the right people.”


Kirubanidhi
Senior Asst. Editor
The Hindu
Chennai

Email: journo1958@gmail.com
Cellphone: 0(if calling from outside Chennai) 9281342829