The Washington Post's online 'innovations'

After having announced its plan a couple of months ago, The Washington Post's online version launched its two-homepage model last week, one page for the 80% of readers that live outside the beltway, the other for DC area locals. Additionaly, it began sneaking advertisements into its RSS feeds. Although it is the first major US daily to adopt such online methods, these moves are not so much innovations as logical steps in news website evolution. Poynter points out that sites such as the BBC, CNN and MSNBC have been 'geotargeting' homepages for some time, even permitting users to add their own input such as local weather. AdAge, reporting on WaPo's RSS ads, highlights the fact that Internet veterans such as Yahoo! and Google have been testing ad-supported RSS feeds for a number of months. These 'new' models can be seen as 'logical steps' because of the trend towards personalized news as noted by New York University professor Jay Rosen who said, "What The Post is doing today is a recognition that the balance of power has shifted to users who can choose the way they receive news... that they're not entirely in charge of how people get their news anymore."

Although still only about 5% of Internet surfers use RSS, the number of subscribers is predicted to grow rapidly as users discover how nicely it facilitates scanning the headlines and directing them towards the articles that they really care to read. Adding advertising to feeds early in the game is a smart business decision that other papers are sure to pick up on.

Two home pages, on the other hand, might not be exactly what readers are looking for, argues Steve Outing at Poynter. He uses the example of his hometown paper the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado that decided to print only local news on the front page, isolating national and international news to inside pages. The experiment didn't go over so well and the paper soon switched back to a front page mix of local and non-local. Outing expects that WaPo will experience the same reaction, especially because most of the Post's Washington readers work in the government and turn to the paper for national and world news. So it seems that the majority of WaPo's online readers will opt for the national/international homepage, a choice that the paper wisely left to the registered user. Instead, Outing suggests that some paper adopt the strategy of several homepages, such as one that focuses on business, one on sports, etc., so as to appeal to an even broader reader spectrum. "This falls short of full personalization, but I suspet that many people who might defer from jumping through hoops to set up a personalized page would be willing to select from a short list of preferred homepages," Outing rightly states.

In this strategy, some papers may find the 'Internet advertising' pot of gold. In it's announcement of its dual-homepage model, chief-executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Caroline Little praised her decision because it would open another source for advertisers. "We have a lot of classified advertising that our local users want, and (the new arrangement) gives us more space to provide that content."

And herein lies the rub. If a paper were to diversify into several homepages as Outing suggests, wouldn't it be able to include even more specific advertisements that local advertisers would know were getting to consumers interested in their product? Local stock brokers and real estate agents on the business homepage. Fitness centers and sports equipment stores on the sports page. Clubs and comic book dealers on the social/youth pages. Isn't this what people have been saying about the advantages of Internet advertising anyway (see previous posting)? So, even though WaPo hasn't completely tapped online potential, in respects to news personalization and the advertising bottom line, it now has a headstart on its traditional print peers.

Sources: Washington Post, Poynter (geotargeting and Outing), AdAge