Continuous News

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The system has been a success at the paper, but just as the Internet is evolving, so is this newsroom’s response. We are constantly evaluating other ways to serve our Web audience and even now are thinking about new models that may prove more effective in the future.?

The efforts to support and enhance daily news coverage at washingtonpost.com have the full attention of all senior editors in our newsroom. It is possible to teach old print journalists new tricks.

I say this from experience. As an editor who has been at the Post for nearly thirty years, I am truly an old breed in my newsroom. In fact, I was hired in 1977 because I was one of

the few college interns who came here knowing how to read the lead-type galleys and pages that this big city paper was still using.

Having grown up in a print shop and small weekly newspaper in Libby, Montana, I felt right at home on the fourth floor of the Post, listening to the deafening roar of clacking Linotypes and dealing with the printers who could simultaneously smoke a cigarette, complain that we were missing deadline, suggest a deft trim in a story that was running long, and shuffle spacer slugs between each line of type to fill out a page – just like they were dealing cards in Las Vegas.

So it is the height of irony that I have been lucky enough to be at the center of this major transformation in the Post newsroom for the past six years. The move to Web journalism is an effort that reporters and editors have come to embrace and have helped define for the entire industry. It is also a part of the newsroom’s mission now, to provide Post journalism – both from the print edition and with breaking stories – to washingtonpost.com, so that it can reach a wider and much more diverse audience than we could possibly attract with our “dead-tree” product.

At times, it hasn’t been an easy transition. We have sometimes had to invent new procedures on the fly. But with a growing global audience – and a shrinking print audience – it is the future, and editors and reporters of all ages and backgrounds here are striving to find ways to serve both sets of readers.

Flexibility has been at the center of the success. Even when the Post’s Web efforts were in their infancy, there were senior editors in the print newsroom who saw the Internet’s potential and worked hard to bring along an occasionally reluctant newsroom. But fairly quickly, both editors and reporters began hopping onboard, aided by the efforts of the CND to make any writing for the Web as effortless as possible.

Post staffers began to understand that the Web stories they put up during the middle of the day were not rivals to their print stories, but instead allowed them to reach sources and readers earlier, to begin to frame the stories that would take shape in the paper and save them time later in the day, and to become competitive with radio and television outlets. As our successes built, they also began to realize that on the Web, audio and video are important tools to enhance stories. This year, nearly 100 reporters and editors are planning to take video training from Web videographers so that they can provide their own visuals for stories on the web.

It would have been inconceivable ten years ago to project this kind of transformation in a very tradition-bound newsroom such as The Washington Post. So it would be foolish to try to pinpoint where exactly our Web efforts will take us in the next decade. But editors and staff are constantly moving and changing to meet the challenge.