AOP: Washington Post to relaunch for 'Web 3.0'

The chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive told an industry conference that the Post will relaunch in the spring and look to develop 'Web 3.0' tools for readers.

Delivering the keynote address at the Association of Online Publishers conference, in London today, Caroline Little told delegates that the Post was aiming to create tools for users to interact better with the site.

The online edition of the paper, she said, wants to provide readers with tools that allow them to communicate and debate with each other and spend more time accessing content deeper into the site.

She highlighted a service that allows pages to form around keywords or tags, and said that pages generated on the fly around tagged words - of which they have 300,000 - would help drive people deeper into the site.

These tagged pages were also optimised for search, she added, helping the Post serve its two distinct audiences online, a local online audience is looking for news, traffic and weather and non-local readers come to the publication for opinion, politics and world news.

"The international/national users often come to us through search engines and some times they don't really know they are on our site, an entire redesign to the Washingtonpost.com, to launch next spring, will really help people know where they are and have better navigation," she said.

(More on developments at the Post on the Journalism.co.uk blog)

The Post has an audience of nine million international readers, she added. Yet, it was the local audience that delivered most of the page views.

She said the Post has the highest penetration locally of any news site in the US, with 40 per cent of locals using the site monthly - 1.3 million people - and that that ten per cent of the audience accounted for 90 per cent of the page views and 60 per cent of the revenue.

The national and international users, she said, approached the site very differently from local users, with 25/30 per cent coming to the site through search engines - rather than the front page preferred by local readers - and looking at fewer pages per person.

Cross over between reading the paper and the website was high, she added, in central Washington, but grew less in the outer lying areas.

The development of hyper-local site Loudon was to combat this and encourage deeper involvement with the site though databases like the Local Explorer site, which plots databases onto Google Maps, and community areas.

(More on hyper-local sites on the blog)

The hyper-local project - led by a small team of developers and utilising the talents of a team of interns - will move to other outlying areas of the city soon.

"Publishing news is important to people locally, even if it's a crime database, what happened last night on what street, people want to know that.

"We also have local bloggers who live in the community. But I believe without that local news piece, which is fresh and updated constantly, you’re just not going to build habit locally," she said.

"The second thing is that we have a large website, so if people have an interest in Loudon we can feed and push that with email and a large variety of other things to get them interested in the Loudon site."

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