Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

"Don Graham got it from the very beginning," said Fulton, now the vice president of audience development for The Bakersfield Californian "He understood how powerful a medium it could be and made a huge commitment." And Kaiser recalls a conversation with Post board member Warren Buffett in which Buffett told Kaiser to stop worrying about the financial side: "There is no case in history of somebody assembling a huge audience and then failing to make money from it," Kaiser recalls Buffett saying.

The washingtonpost.com editorial staff now numbers 65 and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) -- which also manages Slate and the Web sites of Newsweek and Budget Travel -- employs approximately 240. The decision to keep the Web operation separate from the newspaper has, at times, led to tension between the two newsrooms and advertising departments. Complicating the venture over the years has been fear of the unknown, a belief that the free Web site was "cannibalizing" the newspaper, frustration over the large amounts of money spent to build up the site and adapting to revolutionary changes in how readers consume media.

"There was a huge amount of skepticism downtown," at the beginning, said Mark Potts, a senior executive at Digital Ink, who also built the original electronic newspaper prototype for The Post. "There was active resentment by the sales part of the company; in the newsroom, there were a handful of people who got it."

Today, washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady spends much of his time shuttling between the newspaper and the Web site. Meanwhile, many of the site's section editors have developed strong relationships with their counterparts at the newspaper. Interaction between members of the advertising and marketing staffs has also grown over time. And while other major media organizations have made big splashes about merging their online and print operations, Graham has publicly stated that the two operations will remain separate for the time being.

In a recent all-company meeting, Caroline Little, WPNI's chief executive officer and publisher, spoke of recent online innovations. "We set out, very purposefully, about two years ago, to leverage the medium of the Internet, to create more possibilities of conversation and to drive people to come and stay on the site: With blogs, comments on blogs, Technorati [links], comments on articles, a broader and deeper opinion section," she said.

Senior Post editors and Graham, meanwhile, have stated their commitment to developing and sustaining a multi-platform newsroom -- one capable of producing news and information for distribution across a number of platforms. One example: The Post partnered with Bonneville to launch Washington Post Radio in late March, a move that has given local residents another way to get news from The Post.

"We're building a 24-hour multiplatform newsroom," Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr. told the newspaper staff recently. "And we're creating a multimedia news staff."

Downie and other editors hope the newspaper can be used as a launching pad to get readers to listen to Washington Post Radio or experience the multimedia journalism featured on washingtonpost.com. This increased focus on multi-platform journalism is also evident in the discussion of new features. One example is a section tentatively called The Daily Source. Tentatively scheduled to launch in the fall, the Source is being pitched as the newspaper's first truly interactive section, one where readers won't really get the full impact of its content unless they go to washingtonpost.com.

"It's a section that truly embraces the promise of multi-platform journalism; to help time-starved people make informed decisions and to create a real conversation with readers with news that is relevant to their daily lives," said Jill Dutt, assistant managing editor for Financial.

The site hasn't always had 10 years of experience to fall back on, however. In washingtonpost.com's early days, Web professionals were forced to learn on the fly. The Web site's first election night, in 1996, turned into a disaster when technical problems prevented editors from updating the site for long periods of time.

"We had an Internet bottleneck and the servers couldn't handle the traffic," said Mark Stencel, who went on to run the site's political coverage through the 2000 election. "We learned a major lesson -- neither your server nor your vendor should be so far away that you can't kick them."

With the lessons of election night learned, major news events soon proved to be the major engines of audience growth for the site, and also major factors in growing the site's business.