Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com

September 16, 2006 By 1 Comment

Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos–not even the Website’s editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn’t want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor’s laissez-faire attitude.

“It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront,” says Fox. “I didn’t have deadline pressure, I didn’t have editorial pressure, I didn’t have many viewers.”

How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven “Video Journalists” for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces “Fueling Azerbaijan’s Future” and “Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans” are nominated for Emmy awards.


Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.

OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.

OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a “video journalist” at the Post?

Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn’t help but notice. That’s when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that’s on par with the newspaper.

OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?

Fox: I can’t speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It’s not reporter driven and it’s not celebrity-anchor driven. That’s not to say that it’s not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television–they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.

OJR: What is your subject’s reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?

Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don’t match up–much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it’s for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.

OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?

Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don’t think it makes any difference.

In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that’s still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.

I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that’s considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that’s where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.

OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?

Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it’s a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.

So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don’t want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.

Whereas on the web you don’t want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don’t have the answers but it’s a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?

I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What’s the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?

There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?

Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It’s using videos to capture the characters’ stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.

OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you’ve tried something…

Fox: I’ll think twice about it…

OJR: …you’ll think twice about it. That’s a big issue: maintaining a blog.

Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.

OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?

Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I’m not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that’s also a good model that we have tried in the past and we’ve liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.

These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that’s in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.

And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper–the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it’s going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.

That’s not the nuts and bolts but that’s an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that’s something that we noticed. So that’s essentially a good model–not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?

Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it’s more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I’d like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video–like they create writing–you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.

OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?

Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven’t nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don’t want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don’t want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.

I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom–both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.

I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That’s an example a successful collaboration. We didn’t actually work together ever– even our trips didn’t overlap to Azerbaijan–but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that’s the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.

OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won’t be compelling.

Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don’t think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn’t war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.

A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.

OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?

Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS’s “Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria”, it’s on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.

So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren’t cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like “for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com.”

OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?

Fox: What’s really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it’s never going to be as good as when it’s on your TV or when it’s on your high-definition plasma screen, right?

So I think in the next five years–or even sooner than that–we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it’s technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television–either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box–and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won’t matter.

I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that’s on iTunes. That’s kind of the first glimpse–it’s a small screen but it’s essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that’s really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it’s good content or unusual content or it’s better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.

It’s not just for me or for newspaper sites, it’s for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It’s another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.

Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times’ first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , , ,

What Ben Domenech can teach newspaper.coms

April 2, 2006 By 4 Comments

What should newspaper website editors learn from washingtonpost.com’s Ben Domenech debacle?

Well, if the initial response is simply “don’t hire bloggers,” newspaper.coms will miss an enormous opportunity.

The Post deserves credit for courting readers through blogging technology more aggressively than perhaps any other U.S. newspaper. When the New York Times put its op-ed content behind a subscription wall, the Post took the opposite approach, not only soliciting links to its still-free content from bloggers, but returning the favor through linkbacks generated with technology from blog search engine Technorati. The Post has demonstrated an understanding that Web publishing ought to reflect a conversation, unlike traditional, one-way print publishing.

Newspaper.coms that are beginning that conversation shouldn’t fear bloggers dropping gigabytes of criticism their way. If bloggers are complaining, that means they’re still reading. Publishers should fear, instead, the calm silence of an apathetic Web that doesn’t read your site anymore.

Ben Domenech was a lousy hire. Not because he was a blogger, not because he was opinionated. He was a lousy hire because his history of work online revealed a dishonest, shallow writer who added bluster, rather than insight, to his pages. His shrill parting shot at the readers who exposed his plagiarism only further demonstrated his immature self-importance.

Fortunately, Ben Domenech is as representative of online writers as Janet Cooke or Jack Kelley are of newspaper reporters. But, in my experience, too many newspaper reporters and editors continue to assume that most bloggers are just partisan media critics. Such views of the blogosphere ignore the wonderful variety of blogs and independent sites online, some even published by former print and broadcast journalists.

The lure of the voice

Blogs are attracting readers in not insignificant amounts. BoingBoing serves two million readers a day, according to one of its writers. DailyKos serves hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. People want information. They want it presented in an engaging and comforting voice. And they want the writers presenting that information to believe in it.

That’s why newspaper readers love great columnists. People respond to a friendly, authoritative voice. Even Domenech’s blustery RedState delivers its “news” with uncompromising certainty. That isn’t to say that writers shouldn’t put out something they’re unsure about. But they do need to be honest and transparent about what they do — and do not — know.

Popular bloggers speak with an authoritative voice, but not a disembodied institutional voice. Good bloggers engage their readers, becoming a real person whom a reader wants to have a conversation with. And the best bloggers know their topic, and deliver and analyzing information that a generalist can’t.

Newspapers don’t need to hire partisans from the blogosphere to find such voices. Newsrooms and journalism schools have been producing them for generations. And that ought to be the lesson from the Domenech incident. The journalism industry doesn’t need more partisan blowhards. It does not need to turn publications over to right-wingers to hold on to its audience. It does need, however, to better connect with readers who are overwhelmed with media choices.

In addition to encouraging new voices that will draw and maintain readership, newspaper.coms should consider a different style of journalistic writing. Why keep making your writers turn out third-person, inverted-pyramid, “Journalism 101″ articles if the public responds so well to different formats? Journalism developed its publishing conventions in large part to support the technical needs of print and broadcast media. With the Internet those needs no longer always apply.

Ultimately, we’re in the communication business, not the 15-inch-four-source-article business. Why not try new formats in an effort to better communicate? Don’t stick to the established online formats, either. The biggest winners in business are those who don’t copy the competition, but who find something new.

In search of the truth

Of course, writing format is just one of the problems here. A larger issue, one that is potentially more troublesome, is politics. Ben Domenech is a conservative, and many conservatives complain long and loud about the Washington Post. To the extent that conservatives point out errors of fact and unsupported assumptions in news coverage, their views should be heard and the subject of their complaints corrected. But if conservatives — or moderates or liberals for that matter — don’t like the outcome of truthful news reporting or well-researched and argued commentary … tough.

As someone who trained in social and lab science research long before taking a journalism course, it drives me nuts the way this industry misapplies the term “objectivity.” True scientific objectivity doesn’t mean promoting all views, no matter how poorly supported. Nor does it mean refusing to take a stand, no matter how compelling the evidence.

News readers want the truth. They always have. Indeed, with so many media choices now available, they crave someone to do the hard work of sifting through this information and to tell them what can be believed. So, instead of turning over their webpages to partisans spewing the latest talking points, newspaper website editors ought to build their audience by doing what the partisan sites will not — sharp reporting. At the same time, they ought to let their writers deliver that reporting in freshest, most engaging and conversational formats possible. Even if that ticks off readers from one party or the other.

With millions of publishers now reaching the global audience, someone’s going to deliver that kind of coverage. Newspaper publishers will have to decide whether theirs will be among the sites that succeed at that new game.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , , ,

Washingtonpost.com might offer local, national home pages

April 19, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Washingtonpost.com is one of thousands of newspaper sites online, but the operation is unique among the most popular news sites. Washingtonpost.com has become the de facto place for people outside the beltway to get their D.C. political news online, while serving alongside a print paper with a more limited local circulation.

At first blush, it might seem a small difference from the New York Times on the Web, which has the ability to sell print editions to the national Times around the country — and the International Herald Tribune globally. But the Washington Post print edition remains a local animal, with only the National Weekly Edition circulating broadly outside the capital.

Instead, washingtonpost.com has basically become the national and international edition of the paper while also serving a huge slice of the local constituency. And that presents some tricky problems for editors who must, for instance, weigh the home page importance of a local school bus crash with the latest in the ethics brouhaha surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

A little more than a year ago, Caroline Little was elevated to CEO and publisher at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) — which now encompasses Newsweek.com and Slate. Her background is in media law, and she spent some time as WPNI’s general counsel and COO. She broke down the audience dilemma for washingtonpost.com’s management team.

“About 20 percent of our users come from in-market, about 80 percent of them come from national or international,” Little said. “And with the local audience, we have the highest reach of any newspaper Web site in its market — anywhere from 42 to 44 percent depending on the month. That tends to be more of a mass-market audience. And our national and international audience tends to be affluent, business decision-maker, influential audience that we reach during the workday primarily. It’s an interesting mix and presents interesting challenges to us.”


Washingtonpost.com traffic has remained relatively steady since January 2003, with peaks during the Iraq War (March 2003), U.S. election (November 2004) and Pope’s death (March 2005). Source: Nielsen/Netratings

Little said they’re even considering a dual home page — one for a local audience and one for the national and international outsiders — that’s served automatically to users depending on registration data or other geolocation methods.

On the editorial side, Little has been joined by washingtonpost.com’s new executive editor Jim Brady, who took over for Doug Feaver last January and shepherded the site through a redesign. Brady was a longtime sportswriter for the Post, and helped launch washingtonpost.com in 1996, later going to AOL, where he was executive editor of editorial operations.

While the redesign has put roll-down menus at the top of the home page, those roll-down menus aren’t activated on other pages of the site. Plus, the online-only content and blogs sometimes get highlighted on the home page and other times make a disappearing act that makes it almost impossible to find them outside of a site search. Brady says the roll-down menus will eventually come to other pages and that multimedia content will be surfaced more over time.

Because Brady and Little represent new blood in the top positions at WPNI, it seemed like a good time to check in with them. What follows is a double Q&A on the business and editorial challenges that lie ahead as the company integrates Slate into the mix and considers pumping up its award-winning multimedia offerings and a plethora of new blogs.

Online Journalism Review: Caroline, your background is in being general counsel for the company, and Cliff Sloan, now publisher of Slate, was also previously general counsel. What is it about being a lawyer that prepares you for this job?

Caroline Little: It’s an interesting question, because I think a lot of people were really surprised, ‘how did you go from general counsel to COO — that’s a big jump.’ And it is a big jump, because it’s a business role as opposed to a legal role. But in a media organization, when you’re practicing law, you’re looking at the church side and the state side.

For me, I got a really good sense on how the whole organization worked together. It was very good training for being on the business side. A lot of practicing law in-house is about problem-solving. It’s not that different than a COO role. There’s a lot more managing responsibilities in a COO role, managing people, but in terms of really understanding organizations, the legal training was great for me.

OJR: What do you think sets the washingtonpost.com site apart from the other top news sites, both as a business and editorially?

Jim Brady: Editorially, the quality of the Post’s journalism has existed for decades, more than that even. The quality of content is one thing, and the multimedia has won a shelf-full of multimedia awards recently for the stuff we’ve done with photo galleries, and with video. One videographer, Travis Fox, was in Afghanistan a few times, in Iraq a few times, Sri Lanka, and he was just at the Pope’s funeral. I think we do multimedia better than anybody.

The Live Online format, the discussions we do, we have 70 or 80 hours of programming per week. I think we do that better than everybody. I think the Live Onlines are popular because we’ve been doing them for a long time, and so we’ve built a very loyal following for some of the hosts, like Carolyn Hax, Michael Wilbon and Gene Weingarten. You can see when you read many Live Onlines that there are a lot of regulars in these discussions and a real sense of community. We also have built up a great Rolodex of public figures and experts that we can book in a matter of minutes when news breaks, which I think is also a function of how long and how well we have done this.

There are a lot of things that we want to do that will continue to set us apart. In fact, the multimedia folks won 29 of the 90 awards at the White House News Photographers Video Awards competition about six weeks ago. Our goal is to better surface that stuff to people who use this site.

CL: From an audience standpoint, we have an interesting mix of an audience. If you think about all the other top news sites, they either have a print imprint nationwide like USA Today or the New York Times, or they’re a cable outlet or TV outlet with constant cross-promotion going on. For washingtonpost.com, there’s a print newspaper that reaches this local market, yet we have none of the cable assets or other kinds of assets in-house, or a national print vehicle to cross-promote us. About 20 percent of our users come from in-market, about 80 percent of them come from national or international.

OJR: How do you serve those different audiences, when you have this small local segment and you have this huge national and international audience?

JB: One advantage we have is that there’s probably no city in the world in which more things that happen locally actually have an impact nationally and internationally. It’s because of the government’s presence here. But it’s always a challenge to balance and try to maintain on the home page every day — what is a local story that’s big enough that gets major play on the home page on a day in which Congress is in session and there’s national news and international news all day long? We obviously try to cover both … we have to play it by ear day to day.

CL: One of the things we’re looking at is essentially having two home pages: one to address a local audience, who choose to get more local editorial content; and one to address the national/international audience that contains more outside-the-beltway content without focusing on very local content that might be very important only to people in the area. We could do it from registration information or from DNS reverse lookup. We’re looking at how to execute it in the easiest way. It’s something that would help us address the audience issue.

OJR: Would you let people personalize more on the home page?

CL: In a way, it’s the beginning of personalization. We had a product called MyWashingtonpost.com and still do. We launched it a few years ago and found that the audience that chose it has been fairly loyal, but it’s been a small audience. My inclination is to take one step at a time on it. I think maybe we were before our time. We’ll start with that and go from there.

OJR: Is the site profitable, and what has the ad revenues trend been?

CL: We’ve been dramatically increasing — just like all the other news sites — in the 25 to 30 percent range year-over-year ad revenues. I mean all of WPNI [including Newsweek.com]. We don’t break out our overall income figures, but we are profitable by our own internal accouting standards, which has been consistent. And 2004 was our first year [being profitable].

OJR: Can you tell me about the deal with MSNBC and Newsweek.com? Why are you not hosting that site?

CL: Let me give you a little of the background. Newsweek had been on AOL for quite some time. Then all these deals started changing as the Internet was riding up. We were having discussions with MSNBC on a broader level, thinking of all the different assets. We were thinking about washingtonpost.com, and Newsweek online, and we sort of did a large strategic deal. MSNBC was happy to have the Newsweek content, they were happy to host it. We retain editorial control on Newsweek, we sell the advertising, and it works out that way.

OJR: Do you lose some synergy in not hosting Newsweek? Do you think there could be more synergy if you hosted it?

CL: We actually have done some stuff with Newsweek and washingtonpost.com in pointing to each other’s sites. But we tend to — even with Slate and washingtonpost.com — we want to do things that make sense for each of the editorial properties. They each have their own voice, all three of them, and we’re mindful of that. Sure, there are things that we could do, but we always view these things as whether they make sense for each individual property.

OJR: What’s the size of the staff at WPNI?

CL: It’s more or less in the 240 to 250 range. Slate will add about 30.

OJR: What’s your take on paid content? There’s been a lot of talk coming out of the folks at the New York Times, frustration at not getting value out of the content online. Where are you on those types of discussions?

CL: I feel like we’re getting tremendous value out of our audience. I am leery of charging people for content. Based on what’s happened to date, there haven’t been a lot of success stories with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, and they have a smaller audience than we do. And frankly, they’ve got more of a niche site than a general news site. Our local audience, and the audience aggregation story around our local audience, is really critical for us. It’s hard to imagine charging for content when there’s so much competition for where we play right now, that we worry about that. We also have this local/national dichotomy.

A lot of newspapers are talking about this in terms of how do you give added value to the paid subscribers of the paper, and how do you give them some benefits online that non-print subscribers might not get. Either way, you sort of back in to a paid content strategy, because how do you deal with your out-of-market users of the site who can’t get the print paper?

Of course we’re always looking at this because it’s a very popular trend, and online news sites, we’re under a lot of pressure to look at ways to grow our revenues. But my own view is that you have to be very careful not to compromise the audience story that we’re trying to build. And so many of our sites require registration, and I liken the registration from our users as a proxy for paid content, and that’s helped us maximize revenue. But there is an abandonment rate associated with that, which is not insignificant. And that doesn’t include paying money.

JB: Also, if you look at companies that are looking at a pay model right now and the viral nature of the Web today, charging for content takes you out of play in terms of blogs linking to you, takes you out of play in terms of search engines surfacing you. So once you decide to put that pay wall up, you’ve limited your audience not only to the people who directly will come to your site but your ability to get other people into your site sideways.

OJR: What about with paid archives?

CL: With archives, it’s more of a cost/benefit analysis in terms of how much do you get from charging people vs. how much do you get by putting them outside the gate and seeing how much ad impressions you can get. It gets more complicated because many of us have syndication arrangements with companies that syndicate our content, it’s a database storage issue. And frankly, those issues are more complicated than doing a cost/benefit analysis.

OJR: So you don’t want to bleed the value of the database and syndication deals by opening up your archives?

CL: That was historically the reason, but really there’s a growing trend, which I think is interesting, taking articles outside of [the pay wall] that could be something that you give to your subscribers to the newspaper. But you still run into issue of the non-subscribers to the newspaper. It’s something that we debate, but we haven’t made any changes.

OJR: How do you choose your regular online-only content?

JB: We look at areas of the site that we could use an additional column on, or areas that would be of specific interest to an online audience vs. a newspaper audience. For example, we just launched a cybersecurity blog last week called Security Fix. Obviously it’s a topic that’s going to be more interesting to people that are sitting in front of a computer rather than reading a paper. So we’ve looked for opportunities like that.

We also like to use formats that the newspaper generally doesn’t use, blogs being one of them. These help us fill the gaps between the time the paper hits the street with relevant info on the local community or local sports teams, local government, whatever it is. And for the things that are in our sweet spot. For us, the White House Briefing column by Dan Froomkin was an obvious opportunity for us to look at what other people are saying about the White House and aggregate it in one place.

OJR: What about advertising sweet spots? Do you beef up content in order to serve more ads into a certain subject?

JB: It’s always a consideration, but it never gets the deal done all by itself. Obviously if there are areas where we think there are advertising opportunities, that’s sort of a factor, but we’ve launched blogs on the Nationals [the new baseball team in Washington], and Joel Achenbach, one of our humor columnists, launched one not that long ago. For us, the intent was the quality of the content and the ability to get eyeballs to the site. Advertising is a nice piece if you can get it, but it’s not going to make the decision one way or the other.

CL: Also, the advertisers’ interests are not so disparate from where the users want to go. Advertisers want to go where the users are going. There’s usually some synergy.

OJR: Why did you kill the Filter column, which was a tech roundup column?

JB: The woman who was writing it was moving overseas, which was a large part of it. Cindy actually moved on. Secondly, we felt like, after a couple years, it was time to take stock of the column and come at the technology thing from a different direction. We launched Random Access about a month ago with Robert McMillan, which is sort of the intersection of culture and technology.

We felt like that’s where things were headed, which is not about what all the tech companies were doing — there’s a lot of columns out there that cover that. It was better for us to look at how technology is changing our lives on a day-to-day basis. It was more of a sweet spot for us, in terms of looking at what had done well with Cindy’s column, and the things that had done well had more of a consumer focus. Technology issues as opposed to the more IT hardware aspects of it.

OJR: You’re talking about launching blogs, but when I go through the navigation of the site I don’t see anything that says “blogs.” Could that present confusion for some people who are trying to find the Washington Post’s blogs?

JB: There are a lot of things that make blogs distinct as a content type, but I don’t know about aggregating a lot of blogs in one place, because the content of the blogs are so wildly different. You have a humor columnist, you have a Washington Nationals blog, you have cybersecurity. To me, it would be the same as aggregating all of our Notebooks in one place. Put our NFL Notebook with our Maryland Government Notebook.

To me, blogging is a format or a way of presenting information, and putting them all in one place to me doesn’t necessarily make sense. We want to do more of them, and the format appeals to us, which is why we launched so many recently. But I guess our internal debate has always been why do we need to put them all in one place on the site when they have very little in common, other than the format in which they’re presented?

OJR: Tell me about the Slate integration and how that’s going. What are your plans for more integration?

JB: We started a little bit. If you go to Slate, there’s a box on the bottom right with headlines of the day from washingtonpost.com. Within a couple of weeks, we’re going to have one with a lot of our articles [on washingtonpost.com] that will be that day’s top feature from Slate. Jacob [Weisberg, Slate editor] and I talk a lot about what we see as the opportunities for us to cross-link. As we look at our site to build a more robust opinion and commentary area, there will be lots of opportunities to work with Jacob.

OJR: You have a lot of human aggregated features, such as White House Briefing and Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes, and Slate has some as well with Today’s Papers and other aggregations. How do you see them playing out vs. Google and Yahoo and other more automated aggregations?

JB: From a personal standpoint, I think the human side of it is certainly more appealing. It provides context and puts a human being in between the eventual column and the content that’s coming through it, so you have someone who has experience covering politics or the White House and have that person read all these things that are coming out of different sources. Those columns are extremely popular on our site, which would suggest that a lot of people using the Web would prefer to have the human intervention as well.

OJR: The Washington Post ran a story about the future of newspapers, looking at dying print circulation and how newspapers might cope with the growing popularity of the Internet. How was the story received within your organization?

JB: I don’t think it was viewed with great surprise. That similar story had been written by a number of other people in previous months as well. I don’t think there was anything in there that was completely earth-shattering. We’re all pretty close to the business and understand the reality of it today. I don’t think there was a cataclysmic reaction on either side of the river.

CL: We all see change in the media happening. I think the days are gone when people looked at these as balkanized organizations; we’re just one brand we care very deeply about. We’re all working very hard to figure out how we can continue to have people read valuable content from the Washington Post brand and Newsweek brand and that’s how we view it.

OJR: What do you think about the trend in newspaper sites adding citizen journalism, where people contribute photos and stories? Would you consider doing that?

JB: I think citizen publishing is a very interesting area, and one we’d like to explore in places where it makes sense. I don’t know that we’re ready to open the doors for anyone to publish anything on the site, but there are certainly some areas — like local community news — where it makes a ton of sense. Clearly, our core value is that the source of any information be reliable. Nevertheless, the activity in the hyperlocal space is something we’re watching closely.

OJR: You have powerful multimedia content and photos, yet it seems underplayed on the front page and in navigation. Do you have plans to highlight it more in some way?

JB: Yes, we do. You’re right, we’ve won shelves full of awards for our multimedia content, and we need to make it more obvious to our readers. The recent Online Publishers Association study on online video showed that the biggest reason people don’t consume online video is because they don’t know it’s there. I think we have that problem.

We are looking to address this by building some inline video players with playlist capability and by looking into ways to distribute our multimedia content through other channels. In addition, there are times and days during the week where usage of multimedia is stronger, and we need to highlight that content better during those times.

OJR: How important is wireless content to you, and how do you monetize that?

JB: I think we’re in the same place as everyone else right now, which is that we’re exploring options but still can’t figure out what the killer app is that would drive user interest and revenue. A lot of what drives usage of wireless devices — ringtones, games, etc. — are not the sweet spots of news organizations. Maybe down the road, they’ll have to be.

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