Blog Potomac Speaker – Dan Beyers
June 13th, 2008 by Simon HeseltineWashington Post Local Business Editor Dan Beyers was next up with a presentation on the symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media.
He started out with a quote from Steve Ballmer talking about how in 10 years traditional media will be dead (the quote was much longer, but I can only type so fast, but that was the takeaway from the quote). Not great news for a print based business such as the Washington Post…
The Washington Post has really started to move into social media, reaching out to the young people (interns) to get ideas as to what they can do. They have facebook apps, 60 topic specific blogs (including the obituary blog), widgets, etc. Dan runs the local business blog, and is manages the blog along the following lines.
- Stick to your topic. People will find it if the content is great.
- Trying to find ways to engage the audience (more than email). – the post 200, where they list the top 200 companies in the area used to just be a list, now they’re putting together sites for the companies, trying to build communities for the Post 200.
- How can the Washington Post data be used and spread? Their mission is to inform, so they want their data to be used wherever it can.
Q. Will the Washington Post ever become a non-profit org?
A. The St. Petersburg Times follows that model, and the Post has thought about it. Motivations and incentives are different in a non-profit world, but if it’s what it takes to keep the media alive then it may be the way to go.
Q. Does ad revenue from blogs come anywhere close to the ad revenue from the paper?
A. No, but online revenue is growing, while the newspaper is decreasing. One of the interesting items is that the paper mostly targets ads from local businesses, whereas the blog brings in national ad dollars.
Q. Are your blogs more fact checked than the average blog?
A. All blogs must be read by a second person, they are edited and fact checked, but it’s still not as rigorous as articles for the newspaper.
Q. Who moderates your comments? What’s your approval rate?
A. The post took a huge risk by having open comments. There are a few people on staff that are in charge of moderating comments. Real time moderation doesn’t really happen, so it may be several hours before comments are approved. But comments are important as they’re a great way to engage the community.
Q. What role do you see blogs taking in the Election?
A. Blogs have allowed for distributing newspaper style information in a fast manner. He has noticed that about 2 months before an election blogs jump up that talk about local issues, these bloggers then become candidates, so blogs appear to be a really great way to test the waters on issues.
Q. What challenges do you have integrating the blogsin a newspaper environment?
A. Editing is very important for both, the blogs are Washington Post entities, so they can damage the overall brand. There has to be trust that the blogs are as factual as possible.
Q. Will you have some kind of tagging options / comment ranking / profiles for people to tag so that they could look for specific topics on the blogs?
A. This is something that needs to happen, there is some experimentation going on with discussion groups – building out commenter profiles – but it’s not there yet. Gene Weingarten has one of these groups that’s thriving, but it depends on the level of involvement of the moderators.
Q. What are ways that bloggers can get more involved with your stories / participate with your sites?
A. We’re fighting an internal guerilla war. He’s here to try to get ideas from bloggers. He’d like to be able to give more recognition (links) out to bloggers, but it may just not happen. He’s had discussions as to how to get local bloggers to work with the post. They know that they’ve not done enough to engage the local blogginng community, but they’re going to work on it.
Q. With the Washington Post newsroom getting smaller, and the blogging side growing, how has that impacted sources going to the blog rather than to the newspaper.
A. The staff phone list used to fit on legal size paper in micro type, the new list is 2/3 of that size in large type with plenty of whitespace. He’s now talking to more sources and doing more writing than ever before, but it’s not necessarily at the same depth. He starts the day by going out to the web based PR sources.
If you’re going to pitch to him, he needs to know why it needs to be acted on right now, otherwise it’ll be put aside and forgotten about.
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