Speaking on a panel at the Digital Hollywood conference, Jim Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post’s online division, said he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards, and if need be, automatically kick them off for good.
He added that there was no guaranteed anonymity for those who post comments to Washingtonpost.com.
Caroline Little, the CEO of WashingtonPost Newsweek Interactive, has resigned from her post, the newspaper’s publisher has confirmed.
Rumours about here departure bound round the internet last week, till Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth confirmed the move in a memo to staff.
The memo praised Little’s 11 years at the company, but also suggested that the Post newspaper and web teams would move closer together as senior figures in the web team would now report directly to Weymouth.
“I am taking this opportunity to move washingtonpost.com and The Washington Post closer to a true Washington Post Media organisation – rather than a newspaper company and an Internet company,’ the publisher wrote in the memo.
‘To that end, Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com and Rob Curley, vice president of products, will report to me.
‘Goli Sheikholeslami, vice president of classifieds and local products, will report to Steve Hills, president and general manager of Washington Post Media.’
The Washington Post scooped a record six award at last night’s Pulitzer Prize ceremony including the Breaking News prize for its ‘multi-faceted’ online and print coverage of last April’s Virginia Tech shootings.
As the tragedy unfolded, the Washington Post covered the event in print and in multimedia online, providing what the Pulitzer Board described as ‘exceptional coverage’.
The Post provided profiles of each of the 32 victims as well as the killer, Seung-Hui Cho, and wrote about the failure of the university’s mental health services to react to warning signs or help Cho.
It also won prizes for public service, feature writing, national reporting, international affairs and commentary.
Yesterday was just plain pancake day in the UK, but over the water it was Super Tuesday, as 24 of America’s 50 states voted on which candidates should be put forward for the country’s presidential election in November.
The coverage of the day’s events online saw some innovative multimedia and collaborative efforts from new and existing media outlets:
Mapping
Results + different time zones + different states = a great opportunity for breaking news displayed on mashed-up maps.
Google got in on the action with a map displaying live results and, with the help of Twitter and Twittervision, ‘tweets’ from across the US to give instant reactions from voters.
In another partnership with YouTube, as part of the site’s You Choose ’08 channel, Google is aggregating videos and clips from news organisations, candidates and users about Super Tuesday and plotting them on a Google map.
Elsewhere the BBC’s results map, which features as part of a broader election section, gives an easily navigable, state-by-state guide to the figures.
New collaboration
Publish2 launched a bookmarking system for newsrooms, bloggers and journalists, to create an aggregation service. Interested parties were asked to register for a free account and create a specific tag they would use – these tagged items can then be turned into a news feed by Publish2 to be repurposed on the tagger’s site.
Here’s an overview of the Networked Newsrooms idea or, to see it in action, visit the Knoxville News Sentinel or the New Jersey News Herald.
Video
Newsweek and The Washington Post teamed up for a five hour live webcast, encouraging viewers to react in a live webchat. Meanwhile The Huffington Post produced handheld footage from a Barack Obama rally in New York in the build-up to Tuesday and a live blog of the actual event.
MTV sent 23 of its ‘street team’ of citizen journalists to cover the polls and upload footage from video cameras and mobile phones. The clips are being distributed through MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and the Associated Press‘ online video network.
And finally – a slideshow…
…well, it’s much more than that really – De Volkskrant created an all-singing, all-dancing ‘slideshow’ with music, text, links, audio analysis and video giving an overview of the candidates, as well as a live results page for Tuesday’s results.
In a recent blog post, the Washington Post’s Rob Curley applauds the Las Vegas Sun newspaper for its coverage of a fire at the Monte Carlo hotel, Las Vegas. Curley heaps praise on the layered and multimedia approach the paper took in its reporting, as well as the speed with which it was produced.
This is his breakdown of how the news was reported by the Sun:
1. Began with a live blog, regularly updated by the newsroom staff.
2. Addition of photos – the newspaper also set up a way for users to submit their own images through Flickr.
3. Overview of the situation and context e.g. history of the Monte Carlo hotel.
4. Addition of videos – all put up, as Curley points out, while the building was still burning.
“To me, this was a nearly textbook example of how a local newspaper should cover a big breaking news story in its community in the iPhone era,” Curley writes.
His advice to other newspaper newsrooms: be prepared for breaking news.
Why bother? Because, says Curley, local news organisations should use their proximity to events to beat off the competition and serve their audience best.
A comment on this article from Saturday’s print edition of the newspaper, which was used to complement the web coverage, neatly sums up Curley’s argument: “I couldn’t have got that from CNN or any other news station. I was hooked from the start.”
The Washington Post has created a map of local blog coverage as part of its local blogs directory.
The Buzz Map, which has been developed in partnership with Outside.in, plots the most blogged about stories and issues by location and provides links to this coverage, as wells as WaPo articles on the topics. The bigger the circle on a location, the more blogging there’s been about that spot.
According to a blog post from Outside.in, the map shows the top 10 locations ‘based on overall volume over the past week’.
Outside.in sees mutual benefits from the project: “The Post gets an easy way of integrating blog content onto its pages, and the blogs get traffic from — and the fun of appearing on — the Washington Post’s pages.”
What’s more, says Outside.in, creating the WaPo’s map ‘takes five minutes’ – so expect similar blog mapping to be rolled out on other US newspaper sites in the not too distant future.
ABC News and Facebook have entered a formal partnership to deliver political news through the social network.
Facebook’s politics section will carry live debates and allow users contribute to surveys, discussions, polling, as well as accessing ABC News videos and headlines on the site.
Facebook devotees will also be able to offer support to political candidates and follow ABC News reporters on the network.
Away from the dedicated news page, an application will let you access all this information from your profile page.
I particularly like the reporter’s mini-feed that seems to be a mishmash of formal reporting and on-the-fly uploads and updates.
ABC News isn’t the first news provider to get in on the social media phenomenon. The New York Times has a presence on Facebook and the Washington Post has dedicated some serious time to developing applications.
However, ABC’s move looks to have significant depth and resonance about it.
To highlight the partnership, claims the New York Times, the two companies will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on January 5.
“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News, told the Times.
“This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”
While US newspaper websites appear to be going ‘widget’-crazy, there’s a distinct lack of the things this side of the pond.
The way the US sites are using these gadgets shows the breadth of news subjects they can be applied to:
These type of applications can sit on your desktop or feature on sites like Facebook, which now encourages outside software developers to design applications for its users. Answering this call, the Washington Post has developed political quiz application, The Compass, for use on the social networking site.
According to the AP article:
Jim Brady, the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says widgets can boost a newspaper’s brand online, refer new readers back to the site and perhaps generate revenues through sponsorship deals.
Sounds like a plan.
Yet on a quick perusal, there don’t seem to be any on the UK’s newspaper sites. Why not?
Has anyone spotted any, anywhere?