More answers about our Facebook app and some thoughts on the techie stuff behind it
July 21, 2007
Back in May, our special-projects team here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive built washingtonpost.com’s new Facebook app — The Compass.
I wrote a pretty dang long post about it at that time.
I still probably get at least one or two e-mails and/or phone calls about it each week. And I’m surprised how much it still gets blogged about.
One of the questions I often get via e-mail is “would we do it again?”
Absolutely.
We’d do it differently, but we’d definitely do it again. And probably not for the reasons people think.
I think more and more traditional media companies ought to do more …
Chat transcript about LoudounExtra.com
July 17, 2007
Today on washingtonpost.com, I was a part of a live online discussion with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive CEO and Publisher Caroline Little.
We (well, mostly Caroline) answered questions about The Post’s new/first hyper-local site, LoudounExtra.com.
Here is a link to chat’s transcript on the washingtonpost.com site.
In all of my years of helping to set up live chats on our sites, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually participated in one, so this was a little different for me.
:)
LoudounExtra.com launches …
July 16, 2007
Our team’s first “hyper-local” site for washingtonpost.com launched this morning — LoudounExtra.com.
Because — as far as we can tell — no one knows what in the heck “hyper-local” really means, we decided we’d try to take a stab at what we thought it means with this site. More importantly, we didn’t think it meant a site that was essentially just community publishing.
I *love* community publishing. One of my core beliefs is that newspaper web sites need to be much more of a dialogue. But building a site with essentially just community-publishing tools and calling it “hyper-local” seems a little …
Back in California …
July 13, 2007
I’m back in San Francisco, this time for the California Newspaper Publishers Association conference.
On Friday, I give the morning keynote for the group’s summer conference.
A couple of months ago, the organization asked me to answer ten questions, which I think ran in the group’s monthly or quarterly magazine.
Here is how I answered those questions:
+++
No. 1 — Why did you decide to work for a newspaper? What interests you in journalism?
I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was in third grade. It’s all I can ever remember wanting to do.
I was editor of my high school paper back in …
Scandinavian newspapers are doing lots of things right
July 3, 2007
My recent trip to meet with several newspaper folks in Scandinavia was great. Every single time I go to Europe for something like this, I get so much out of it.
I kept asking the folks who had brought me there why they had asked me to come talk with their newspaper staffs because they all were doing so many great new-media things really well. They didn’t need any help or suggestions from me!
And these aren’t huge newspapers. Most were right around the 50,000-circ level or lower.
The common theme of these newspapers is that they all are partners in something …
