Washington Post needs to do some structural work on its shaky new strategy

January 7, 2009 by

[Editor’s note: Tom Grubisich is a former Washington Post reporter and editor]

In her first major statement as publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth late last year announced a seemingly Zen-inspired long-term strategy of three pillars. The pillar that caught my attention was the second:

“Providing utility, engagement, and convenience for our local readers.”

“Engagement”! Weymouth gets it, I said to myself, the Post is going to build a 21st century community to stay relevant, and financially healthy.

But after reading her whole “The Road Forward” document, I think my optimism may be misplaced.

Weymouth details what the Post will do about utility (“make the paper and washingtonpost.com go-to places for local information”) and convenience (“make it possible for [local consumers] to complete many… transactions on the site”). But nowhere does Weymouth expand on how the Post will promote engagement.

How odd – and disturbing. It’s great that the Post will work ever harder to help its readers and users find movie listings and streamline their shopping. But what, if anything, does it plan to do about helping to turn them into a community that can make the District of Columbia and its suburbs – home to many of them – better places to live?

Metro Washington is, as Weymouth says, an “affluent, highly educated, growing market,” but that demographic jargon doesn’t really define the 5.5 million people who live, work and play – with increasing difficulty – in that “market.”

The District, with 104,000 people living at or below the poverty line, has the third highest poverty rate in the U.S. Its child poverty rate is the highest.

While metro Washington’s suburbs don’t have poverty rates anywhere close to the District’s, they are starting to feel a sizable hurt from a recession that the federal government recently discovered began in December 2007.

The home foreclosure rate in metro Washington increased 574.94% in 2007 – the third highest increase in the nation. In one area in suburban Maryland (including Bethesda, home to thousands of Weymouth’s “affluent, highly educated”), foreclosures soared 1,288 percent – the highest increase of the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas.

Last May, USA Today featured this man-bites-dog lead sentence on a story: “The Washington area may be home to the nation’s power brokers, but it isn’t immune to the infrastructure woes that plague big cities throughout the nation.”

“The rupture [of a water main that closed 800 restaurants] follows a series of recent disruptions for Washington area residents, including a blackout in downtown Washington, a Metro subway train derailment and track damage caused by the heat,” the story said, and quoted officials who said the water system is “aging, overtaxed and underfunded.”

Just before Christmas 2008, another water-main break – in that same “affluent, highly educated” Bethesda – turned a major commuter road into a roaring river from which nine motorists had to be rescued, three of them by helicopter.

In Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, home to yet more of Weymouth”s “affluent, highly educated,” there is a severe shortage of recreational facilities.

“We are shoving so many kids on these fields. It’s unbelievable,” said Beckwith Bolle, president of the Ashburn Soccer Club in an article in a local community paper. “Right now we are putting 1,500 kids [a week] on fields with room for only 600.”

As metro Washington’s local governments see their tax revenues continue to shrink in response to the double-digit plunges [PDF] in housing valuations, human and infrastructure needs will become even more critical.

In the midst of so many challenges within its major coverage area, wouldn’t this be the time for the Washington Post to go all out for community engagement, and to do so with its most powerful platform – washingtonpost.com?

I am a regular user of washingtonpost.com, but when I sign in, I don’t really feel as if I’m part of any kind of welcoming community – not the way I feel when I sign in on Facebook.

On Facebook, my community consists of people I’ve connected with and who’ve connected with me. They all have names (real ones, not Internet handles) and they enthusiastically share their interests and missions, often giving me a “poke” to get involved. If I want to fight poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa or global warming in the U.S., or do any number of other desirable things, big or small, thanks to my Facebook friends, I know where to go.

I get no such community guidance, much less inspiration, from washingtonpost.com. Most of the site’s users hide behind handles, making it difficult, if not impossible, to forge connections.

It’s high time it was said: You can’t build a robust community through anonymity. Washingtonpost.com has clung to this outdated Web convention because it didn’t want to do anything that threatened to decrease traffic to its site. (This could change with the recent resignation of washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady, who was an ardent defender of letting users choose to be anonymous.) Meanwhile, pure-play social networking sites like Facebook, where members say exactly who they are, grow rapidly.

If washingtonpost.com made engagement as high a priority as utility and convenience, it could create a Web-based community that would become a powerful force for good in metro Washington. Such a site could throw a continually searching spotlight on the region’s serious problems, especially as they are made worse by an economic crisis that we are told may rival the Great Depression. More important, such a site could be the platform for connecting the dots between words and action in finding solutions to those problems. In the coming era of economic hunkering in, wouldn’t washingtonpost.com users find help on community building more valuable than how to speed their shopping transactions?

Not incidentally, a fully engaged washingtonpost.com would ensure the Post’s relevancy as its once-super-profitable, high-penetration print product becomes more marginal.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ David Brooks – an astute chronicler of social-cultural transformations in America – wrote:

“People… moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.”

Washingtonpost.com could be the nexus of many of those meeting places in metro Washington. But that won’t happen unless Katharine Weymouth orders her team to strengthen the most important section of the Post strategy’s second pillar – engagement.

Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With: ,

How the New York Times can fight back and win: a reprise

December 3, 2008 by

The New York Times Co. — the whole caboodle, including the esteemed and necesssary flagship paper, 18 other, mostly monopoly dailies, the spunky About instructional search engine and minority ownership of the half-redeemed Boston Red Sox — is worth less than what the company paid for just one of its properties, the Boston Globe. That’s what the stock market said as of Wednesday, Nov. 26, and that was after a bounceback from a near-historic low — $5.34 – on Nov. 21.

With advertising in its print edition continuing to slide by double-digit percentages, the Times is pursuing, in the words of President/CEO Janet L. Robinson, a “strict cost discipline.” But, happily, it’s looking as if the company finally understands that it can’t cut its way back to financial health (and a stock price that doesn’t look like an unfortunate misprint).

In August 2007, when the company’s stock had already fallen to a 12-year low, I argued in these pages that the Times could fight back by leveraging the power of its nytimes.com website through the force of social networking. Finally, it’s begun doing so.

The results of the Times recent presidential election promotion on Facebook are amazing – 68.3 million page views of the “What should Barack Obama do first as president” teaser ad and the number of Times “fans” on Facebook soaring almost overnight from 49,000 to 164,000. That’s precisely what viral marketing can do – when there’s untapped potential behind the marketing hype. And nytimes.com – with more than 20 million unique visitors monthly – has potential that no other newspaper site can approach.

I stress “potential,” because the Times, so far, has done too little to capitalize on an audience that includes big slices of all the demographics that advertisers want:

  • Two thirds of users are in the most coveted 25-54 age range.
  • Fifty-seven percent are women (who buy or influence the purchase of 80 percent of all consumer goods, according to marketers).
  • Average income is near $80,000.
  • Close to 50 percent live in the top 25 markets.

    The Times did make one big try to monetize nytimes.com, but that turned into the flop called New York TimesSelect, which put the paper’s columnists behind a subscription wall. Only about two percent of nytimes.com users signed up for the premium service, which cost $7.95 a year or $49.95 yearly. The $10 million in revenue that TimesSelect reeled in was more than offset by potential long-term traffic losses because some of nytimes.com’s most popular features were no longer available on search engines. The walls of TimesSelect came down in September 2007, two years after it was launched.

    The big mistake of TimesSelect, beyond ghetto-izing 98 percent of nytimes.com users, was trying to monetize a mass product, which is what Times columns are, even if they bear the marquee names of Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd or Tom Friedman. What the Times ought to be doing is monetizing all the resources of its considerably talented staff, which includes not just the renowned names on op-ed columns but scores of reporters, critics and editors who are treasure trove of valuable intelligence on any number of subjects, elevated or lowly, or know where to find it.

    Here’s how that could be done:

    Newyorktimes.com launches TimesPlus – a premium service that gives subscribers access – literally – to the minds of the entire Times newsroom staff, which includes more than a thousand information experts.

    Let’s say you’re planning a trip to New York. You would complete a checklist where you list all your preferences – everything from hotel (e.g., small, non-convention, mid-priced, convenient to theater district and Madison Avenue shops) to hot but unheralded shops and attractions. Your preferences would be fed into a continually updated database to which the entire Times editorial staff would, as part of their jobs, contribute the latest information (and maybe gossip). You would get back responses to all your preferences, and also an advisory listing discounts your handsomely embossed, computer-chip-embedded TimesPlus subscriber card would give you at New York shops, restaurants and attractions.

    Let’s say, like many nytimes.com users, you follow national politics closely. You could sit in on a weekly video conference phone call — open only to TimesPlus subscribers – during which top Times political reporters, columnists and editors would riff about latest developments and take questions.

    There would also be similar exclusive-content conference calls covering subjects like foreign affairs, the arts, books, entertainment sports, food, science and health – anything that the Times staff is expert on.

    Five times a year, TimesPlus subscribers could submit personalized requests – say, what are safe and interesting but not pricey neighborhoods in Brooklyn (or Los Angeles or Dallas/Fort Worth)? – that would be answered with up-to-date information contributed by Times staffers.

    TimesPlus would be priced at $10 a month, or $100 a year if paid upfront. If 5 percent of nytimes.com’s 20 million unique visitors became subscribers, that would add $100 million revenue that would more than replace tshrinking print ad revenue.

    The percentage of subscribers could be even higher if the Times could convince merchants, restaurants and entertainment venues in all the major U.S. markets to give special deals to TimesPlus members. For many subscribers, those deals would more than pay their TimesPlus fee – just like most holders of the Barnes & Noble Membership card save more than the $25 fee through their discounted book purchases

    TimesPlus would have its own comment boards where subscribers could contribute their ratings, and cross swords with Times experts.

    TimesPlus would also let subscribers build their own multi-media mini-sites and form groups among themselves. What a great place the site would be for subscribers to offer housing for pleasure or even business trips to New York and other cities, as well as vacations, or to sell art and other special and unique objects.

    Subscriptions might start slowly – many people remember TimesSelect – but if the site lived up to even half of its potential, viral marketing would take over and in a couple of years subscribers could swell to several million or more. Imagine the revenue potential if that happened.

    Purists might say what does all this – tips for tourists! — have to do with the mission of the New York Times. But the Times already produces reams of features that are tips about a 10,000 things less significant than how to reduce your carbon footprint. What would be different about TimesPlus intelligence is that it would marshal all the Times considerable but underused resources. The Times has a newsroom staff of about 1,300. TimesPlus would mobilize that talent much more efficiently than the space that editorial content gets in either the print or online paper.

    As recently as 15 years ago, the only New York Times was its print edition. If you lived in Peoria, Ill., you might have to drive a couple of miles to find a place that sold it. The Internet put the Times in reach of anyone with a computer. The editors still made all the decisions about what would go online pages, but at least now there was feedback – sometimes blowback — from users. TimesPlus would break down even more barriers. It would create more and direct connections between Times staff and its readers, and, let readers form relationships among themselves in all kinds of social, professional and volunteer categories. Very likely, subscribers could become a critical mass of resource material for the Times as it uses the Internet to widen its net of information gathering.

    As Times stock has descended in a near-straight line, the specter of bankruptcy has reared its head. Even reorganization would probably mean the end of revealing investigative stories we have seen during the current financial crisis, like this one that opened the door to the executive suites at Merrill Lynch as it was gorging itself on fees from flipping high-risk derivatives, or this one that did the same for Citbank.

    TimesPlus could prevent that from happening. It would provide the bridge from the print to online paper that is desperately, and speedily, needed.

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    It's a lo-o-o-ong way from Lawrence, Kan., to Loudoun County, Va.

    June 9, 2008 by

    The headline on the Wall Street Journal story about the Washington Post’s widely watched venture in local-local journalism on the Web was unambiguous: “Big Daily’s Hyperlocal Flop.”

    So how bad actually is LoudounExtra.com? Let’s look.

    On the LoudounExtra homepage, I am greeted with this above-the-fold spread:

    Screen shot of LoudounExtra

    My squinting eyes try to read the reverse-type blurb, but before I can finish, a new image/blurb is automatically rotated in the space.

    After figuring out how to retrieve the original blurb, I pull up the story. Big mistake.

    The operative graf:

    “After an hour-long hearing during which the lawyers’ oral arguments were interspersed with questions from the justices, the two sides began the long wait for a ruling that is not expected until mid-September.”

    Got that? There won’t be any news about the school for more than three months, but here are 640-plus words of if’s and maybe’s – with a photo showing students from behind (an unflattering view that even a beginning photographer should know to avoid). Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. And this is happening on a 24/7 website of one of the best newspapers in the country?

    (In fairness to LoudounExtra, it partially came to its (news) senses later in the day when it provided on-the-fly (though far-too-broad-brush) coverage of severe storms that swept through the area.)

    The Post started LoudounExtra to attract Internet users in one of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S. Most Loudoun residents, in contrast to those who live closer in to Washington, don’t read the print edition of the Post. The majority of Loudoun residents are in their family-rearing years. If they use washingtonpost.com – the gateway to LoudounExtra.com – they don’t have the time or inclination to read thumb suckers about something that might happen in three months. Besides, the school that may or may not be built would only affect a minority of families in sprawling Loudoun.

    I browse over the rest of the homepage, up and down and from side to side. All told, I encounter a blotchy hodge-podge of about 55 headlines and teasers: “Living in LoCo…Political Battles, Luggage Sale…10:30 a.m. – Glenfiddich Farm Cooking Class, Light Moroccan.”

    I look for something, anything, about Hillsboro – a hamlet in mostly rural western Loudoun where I used to live — but there was nothing. When I do a “Hillsboro” search of the site, the top-ranked articles were six months or more old.

    The team that developed LoudounExtra was headed by online local journalism guru Rob Curley, whom the Post hired after he earned a national reputation for how he mixed and matched multimedia, undiscovered databases and funny, informative and sometimes weird user contributions to transform the Lawrence, Kan., Journal-World site into a hugely popular virtual town square, and then worked his same magic at the Naples, Fla., Daily News. Curley, who is leaving the Post and joining the Las Vegas Sun with five members of his Post team, said in the WSJ article:

    “I was the one who was supposed to know we should be talking to Rotary Club meetings every day,” Mr. Curley said. “I dropped the ball. I won’t drop it in Vegas, dude.”

    But I’m not sure that LoudounExtra will find its mojo by sending its staff to deliver speeches at Rotary meetings. For Curley, who was the Newspaper Association of America’s “New Media Pioneer of the Year” in 2001, that sounds so 20th century.

    LoudounExtra’s problems begin with how it’s mapped. As the WSJ article points out, people don’t live in “Loudoun.” They live in communities within the county like Ashburn, Sterling and Broadlands – each a sum of many particulars (geographic, demographic, historical, occasionally quirky) that add up to identity as specific as a strand of DNA. Kind of like Lawrence, KS, where Curley found the inspiration to do his hyperlocal pioneering.

    But Lawrence has a super-special identity. It’s a college town – home to the University of Kansas, with its 25,000 students, the most important of whom are the 17 who play on the closely followed and passionately embraced Jayhawk basketball team. Shrewdly, Curley and his Lawrence Journal-World web team found myriad ways to tap into that passion to help produce content that drove monthly page views from 500,000 to 6 million.

    Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent to KU and its Jayhawks in the 10 or so communities of Loudoun. But that doesn’t mean hyperlocal can’t succeed in those communities.

    Curley and his team did produce some rich hyperlocal content in Loudoun. But it was mostly what he calls “little J” – Little League, proms, crime blotters. But because each community didn’t get its own homepage, the little J news was lost in the welter of headlines and promos of the single, countywide homepage.

    A community site should have two tiers – one for the little J and one for what Curley calls the “big J.”

    In Lawrence, with a population of about 89,000, plus the big KU campus, it wasn’t hard for Curley and his team to produce a lot of big J. But how do you do that in an Ashburn or Sterling or Broadlands, which are a lot smaller than Lawrence and don’t have any news-generating institution even close to KU?

    Mike Orren’s Pegasus News, which covers more than 150 communities in Dallas/Fort Worth, has come up with some encouraging answers. Most of the Pegasus communities, like those in Loudoun, don’t have any KU-type institutional news generators. Yet Orren and his team of editors – who function more as impresarios – have teased out some excitement from all of them.

    Pegasus gives each community its own homepage. But it’s not overly provincial. From their registered homepage, users can hop, ski and jump to nearby communities – actually all 150-plus. They can also easily zoom out to the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area.

    Pegasus’ community homepages also are sleek and clean – in contrast to the mish-mash of LoudounExtra’s single, countywide homepage. There are fewer headlines and promos, and they stand out because they’re crisply, and often cleverly, written (“Burglars take aim at Arlington gun store“).

    But as lively as Pegasus is, it still hasn’t produced the passionate engagement that Curley often sparked in Lawrence.

    The answer, I believe, is to build a site that encourages people to express, in a variety of ways, how they think and feel about their community. I’m talking about a lot more than restaurant or shopping reviews. What makes residents proud? What are their opinions about their schools, recreational facilities, police protection? Who do they rank as their community’s first citizens? What volunteer groups do the best job? What’s the No. 1 problem?

    The answers and counter-answers – which could include a simple A to F grading – would generate a huge amount of news about what works and doesn’t work in a community. Public and private leadership, which is mostly missing from comment on current hyperlocal sites, would be under enormous pressure to respond, especially when particular criticisms – a shortage of ball fields, unfounded school improvements, a shabby neighborhood shopping center – draw supporting comments.

    To produce this kind of passionate engagement, a site would have to be carefully structured and developed. A different topic for discussion and grading could be promoted each week. Individual grades would be converted into overall scores that would be prominently featured on the homepage. Periodically, topic grades would be averaged to produce an overall community grade. This would produce some rivalries among nearby communities, adding to the passion. There would have to be controls to prevent one contributor from posting multiple grades for one entry and other safeguards.

    An engaged hyperlocal site would also embrace the goals of social media. Tools tailored to what people want at their community level (e.g., who can help to raise funds for local charities, who wants to join a movie club, who wants to share nanny-hiring intelligence, etc.) would be provided.

    The site should also enthusiastically embrace business potential. Registrants would be rewarded with a card – handsome and snail-mailed – that would entitle them to a 10 percent discount at participanting restaurants, stores and services. In a gesture to community giving, those businesses would, several times a year, declare a week when 10 percent of all revenues from card-bearing customers would go to selected local charities.

    All this, of course, would be harder to put together than making speeches to Rotaries. But if hyperlocal wants to build a better model than LoudounExtra and get its share of what Editor & Publisher calls the “astounding” growth in online local ad revenues — currently $2 billion annually – it doesn’t have any other choice.

    Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With: ,
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