Tag Archives: The Washington Post

WaPo wiki site to focus on US politicians and government officials

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The Washington Post has launched a new beta site Whorunsgov.com to build profiles of US politicians, law makers and government officials using a specially created Post editorial team.

The site and its news blog will also feature contributions from external experts, a release from the paper said, and will be expanded into a moderated wiki later this year.

At this stage users will be encouraged to edit and add to profiles on the site with submissions moderated by the editorial team.

Interactivity – in particular allowing users to discuss profiles on the site – is a key part of the project:

“This is the first phase of a new venture to create a uniquely collaborative and rich information resource that demystifies the individuals behind Washington’s policy-making process,” said Rachel Van Dongen, editor of WhoRunsGov.com, in the release, adding that the site is intended as a free-for-all resource.

Those featured on the site will also grow to include think tank members and state officials.

Washingtonpost.com: First ever female managing editor at Washington Post

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Two new managing editors have been named at the Washington Post: one of them is a the first woman in the role in the paper’s history. Full story…

WashingtonCityPaper.com: ‘An advance copy of the Washington Post’s reorganization plan’

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The WashingtonCityPaper shares ‘an advance copy of the Washington Post’s reorganization plan’.

The site, ‘forever a friend to local media institutions’, has announced it is ‘hereby stepping in and taking charge’.

“We’ve taken the time to interview key media strategists, examine the Post’s assets, and knit together a strategic plan for the ages.

“It’s all written up in corporatese, sans copyright, so the Post can just cut, paste, send to ALL, and gauge the reaction on FishBowlDC.

“It’s even in memo format, and it comes with ‘off the record’ boxes that will help Post employees sort through the mumbo-jumbo.”

Read, and enjoy.

Washington Post using Apture for article links

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The Washington Post has teamed up with Apture to add embedded links into its news articles. Washington Post articles, video content and Google maps will be linked to using the technology, which, according to a press release, requires only a single line of code to make the links appear.

Information from WaPo’s Congressional Votes Database will be linked to congress and senate members’ names when they appear in articles, as part of the new design.

WaPo content will now be available to other media and political sites that sign up to Apture. Articles already allow readers to view who’s linking to that content in the blogosphere.

Apture’s technology has previously been used by BBC News as part of its inline links trial and its use by WaPo follows the launch of the New York Times’ link aggregation service TimesExtra last week.

Election traffic: WashingtonPost sees biggest jump but CNN leads

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Beet TV’s Andy Plesser, writes that the Washington Post was long a pioneer in online content,

“[and] … registered the biggest percentage jump on Election Day, compared to the previous Tuesday, Nielsen Online reported last night.  Although far from the newly crowned traffic leader, CNN.com, the Post jumped 113 percent to 2.3 million unique visitors”

So, CNN were the real winners of the day with a 400 per cent traffic spike for the site.

Here, CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien speaks to Beet TV about reporting from the exit polls, and the changes she has witnessed in web reporting over the past 12 years.

CUNY: Innovative web video journalism panel

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City University of New York (CUNY) is hosting a panel on innovative web journalism, which we are going to attempt to stream below. It kicks off at 6pm (EST). It can now be viewed by following this link here.

Participating in the discussion of video storytelling online are:

Travis Fox, Emmy-award winning video journalist from The Washington Post

Rachel Sterne, founder and CEO of GroundReport, a citizen journalism platform at GroundReport.com

Benjamin Wagner, vice president of MTV News

Daniel Greenberg, director of production at WNET

Thanks to CUNY professor Sandeep Junnarkar for the link to the live coverage.

Mapping: BBC reports live event with map tools; WaPo plots Travis Fox

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Mapperz blog is claiming a BBC first, as the corporation used a series of mapping tools to cover today’s parade in London of Britain’s Beijing Olympics team.

The interactive map featured Twitter updates from BBC sport journalists Tom Fordyce and Ollie Williams and was capable of showing photos submitted by spectators (though it appears only one has been uploaded at time of writing).

It links to a Flickr group of images from the parade, live text updates on the BBC website and a full news and video report on the event.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is plotting the progress of Travis Fox, as the video producer makes a journey across the states reporting on how the economic downturn is affecting citizens.

Fox’s route is shown with markers indicating video posts and photos, which are also included in his blog reports below the map.

WAN Amsterdam: Little known fact?… Guardian special advisor@Digital Revenue Goldmine

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Caroline Little, this year’s keynote speaker at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Digital Revenue Goldmine event, used her experiences at the Washington Post and Guardian to talk about the future of the web for newspapers.

Most delegates had probably heard the sentiments of Little’s speech before, unless they’ve been living on another media planet for the past five years, but were eager to ask how she had implemented changes at her two workplaces.

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/carolinelittle.mp3]

What was her budget? How would she have coped without the strength of brand? How to manage economically while making the changes?

Little did not really give concrete examples and afterwards she told me it was perhaps too early in the day to talk specifics – she’s only been in the role at the Guardian since August. I’ll be sure to follow up with her in a few months time… The news report on her speech can be read here.

Daylife targets online publishers with new multimedia service

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The software engineering company behind Sky News’ recent online revamp, Daylife, has launched a new product aimed at online news publishers.

Sky used Daylife’s products to create topic pages of related multimedia content called ‘in depth’ pages.

The new Daylife Enterprise API will similarly let publishers re-purpose blog posts, text, data and audio-visual content in new ways online.

How does it do this? The service will collect this content and then create feeds which the publisher can put to use a variety of ways – as per their request.

For example – the Enterprise API was trialled by the Washington Post to create picture galleries from the Beijing Olympics – searchable by sport and country – and to accompany its US presidential campaign coverage.

Daylife took all the incoming photos from Post photographers around these subjects and made them available to the paper as an API, ready for use to create new pages on its website.

Utilising existing content in this way can be a success in terms of web traffic – making sites a more attractive prospect for advertisers, says Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand.

As part of the product, publishers can make these content feeds open to the public and third-party developers – a feature which Shardanand hopes will lead to more collaboration on news content between publishers and users.

“In terms of e-commerce and advertising there’s been so much innovation in the last 10 years online, in comparison there’s not been so much in news,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“How do you innovate if you don’t do software? I don’t know what the next best concept is but a service like ours can be shared.”

Publishers should not dismiss outsourcing this work, says Shardanand, after all it’s not their job and with the amount of content they have available would be extremely time consuming – the company has over 200 machines running to process the content. It’s not for free, but licences are decided on a customer-by-customer basis.

Instead, he told us, the aim is to get the most value out of the content that publishers are already producing for both online and other editions – such as the photos taken by WaPo staff – by doing the backend work for them.

Crucial to the success of the project will be the say that publishers have over what is done with their content – something which Shardanand is keenly aware of.

“These have to be content portals that are still customised and match your brand and voice,” he says.

“It wouldn’t work if the editors couldn’t do exactly what they want. Advertisers wouldn’t value it either.”