@AOP: WPNI’s Caroline Little: How the Washington Post caters for both hyperlocal and global audiences

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 October 2007 at 10:07
Tags: Journalism

The Washington Post’s web site is serving two very different categories of readers, says Caroline Little, chief executive and publisher of Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive.

The Post is essentially a local newspaper which is not available outside the Washington, DC, area. But online, it has developed a large national and international readership online.

The local and national/international readers use the site in very different ways, says Little. Serving them both requires thinking about the site as almost two seperate businesses.

The Post has the highest local peneataion of any local news site in US — 40 pc of the users, 1.3m users per month. 9m 15 per cent interational. One innovation to build for this audience, the Post has built Local Explorer site, which plots databases onto a Google Map.

Local Explorer has been very successful, she says, but the Post’s research shows that readership tapers off the farther from central Washington a person lives. Further out in the market, there’s more of a dropoff, which is why the the Post has been experimenting with hyperlocal sites for suburban communities, starting with Loudon Extra in suburban Virginia.

The Post picked Loudon because it’s one of the fastest-growing counties in the US and is very wealthy. Wanted to provide very deep information at a very local level. It’s not produced by core online staff, but by a five-person skunkworks team and “a bunch of interns”. “It’s a very different model for us,” she says.

Will soon be launching in another county. This time, it will identify communities by villages, rather than county, because htis is closer to the way people imagine themselves.

The broader audience, meanwhile, uses the site much less heavily. They view far fewer pageviews per sessions. They often come into the site from search engines. The key for the company is to attract them from aggregators and other sites using widgets.

Sometimes they don’t even realise they are on the Washington Post site, leading to a greater stress on branding. This will be a major part of the a relaunch of the The Washington Post.com site in the spring.

This audience is primarily looking for US politics and policy coverage. One technical innovation aimed at the national/international audeince, which primarily looks for US politics coverage, is the issue coverage tracker for the US Presidental election. It compares the volume of press vcoverage of various elections in the US presidential election.

Retaining these readers and driving them deeper into the site is also important. They are doing this with interactivity and compelling multimedia content, says Little.

Keeping these users engaged in the site is also important. Using services from Pluck, the Post started discussion groups to seed an idea. Increase visibility to aggreators with most viewed article and social bookmarking links, and links to external related stories.

At the moment the Post is really focusing on mobile, because the US is very far behind Europe in this area. Readers should be able to access the site from Blackberrys and iPhones. They are also producing a lot of widgets . These tools allow users to place RSS feeds on their sites to draw traffic, and more importantly, to create brand awareness around the web. Sometimes, the latter is more important, as in the case of the Facebook “Political Compass” application. The Post offered prizes to staff for widget development.

More coverage from: Jim Muttram, Karl Schneider, Jemima Kiss.

Tags: Journalism