News Never Sleeps

Continuous news is continuous change.

At The Washington Post, continuous news is the name of the desk in the print newsroom that provides breaking news stories to the paper’s sister company, washingtonpost.com. The Internet is a dynamic, fast-paced world – and so is our response.

For example, on January 11, the day after President Bush’s pivotal prime-time announcement that he was sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, the Continuous News Desk, called CND at the Post, moved an early-morning instant poll reaction story to the speech and another story late in the day with more refined analysis of the poll; a story that chronicled administration officials talking about the new policy and congressional reaction; a story about then-Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte’s congressional testimony on the official threat assessment of Iraq’s insurgency; and a column by our media critic, Howard Kurtz, about the president’s remarks and the coverage that day. This was in addition to eight other news stories dealing with subjects not involving Iraq sent to the Web on January 11. Many of those stories (a total of 324 column inches) were updated throughout the day, including the main congressional reaction story, which was rewritten six times as news warranted.?

The CND began in earnest in 1999 with one editor, who was hoping to get six stories or online-only columns from the print newsroom to post on the Web site at midday as a “PM Extra” edition of the paper. The objective was to alert Web readers that this was not a static site and they could come back to it during the day for news. Then came such major stories as the President Clinton impeachment, the disputed election of 2000, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Afghan conflict and the Iraq war.
With each crisis came new readers, who often returned to the site. In addition, Web news became more accessible for many people with the increasing use of computers and broadband connections. Both factors led to tremendous growth of the readership at our Web site. In late summer of 2000, regular daily page views at washingtonpost.com were somewhere in the 3 million range. Today, they are more than 8 million.

By the end of 2006, the CND employed five reporters and three editors and routinely moved a dozen stories or more to the Web while also providing regular morning updates to the Post’s local radio station. Our work includes editing stories from beat reporters who file early for the Web, writing our own spot stories based on quick reporting, or serving as a rewrite desk that takes information from other reporters who are too busy to sit down to file for the Web. We serve as a primary conduit between the print newsroom and the Web newsroom for breaking news.

Lexie Verdon is a native Montanan - born in Malta and raised in Libby. She fell in love with newspapers working for The Western News, which was published by her parents, Paul and Elaine Verdon. She graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism, and this year marks her 30th anniversary working at The Washington Post.