Friday, March 23, 2007

Elise Bauer Caroline Little at the Blogher Business Summit yesterday.

I'm attending (and, today, speaking) at the BlogHer Business Summit in New York. Yesterday, Caroline Little, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, spoke to the audience about how her organization perceives the role of blogs and online media -- and especially how this can affect content by, about, and for women.

Afterward, in a small-group breakout session, Little shared more observations. Since I was the group's designated reporter, here are some highlights from my notes:

When asked what the Post's online team does to make print-side staff comfortable, Little said, "We're very fortunate that our Chairman [of the Washington Post Company], Donald Graham, has been enthusiastic [about our online operations] and has not merged us back into the paper. They would just tell us what to do. Almost all the Web divisions of papers have been merged back."

And also, "Actually, most people [on the print side] are enthusiastic about online media. of course, there's always some resistance to change, even within the online division. When we hired [VP of product development] Rob Curley, he freaked people out here a little bit. He had his own way of doing things, and people here said at first 'We don't do it that way.' But they realized they were doing exactly what we didn't want the paper doing to us, so we adapted."

As I'd done Wednesday at a Columbia j-school panel, I asked Little what value she thought online community brings to her bottom line. She said, "I think we're only just beginning in terms of serious community engagement on the Web. We have that going well with our local audience, but we're expanding that with our national and global audiences. ...We all want repeat customers. When people are engaged and interacting [with our site], page views go up, which of course helps for advertising."

Little thinks it's possible that engaged, participating online community members might prove to be more valuable "eyeballs" for advertisers. Shortly, washingtonpost.com will implement a more sophisticated Web analytics tool, Omniture, which will provide richer insight into how people use the site and how that might drive revenues.

There are a lot of underused opportunities which could benefit online advertisers, especially online ads targeted at women, she noted.

Also, on Monday washingtonpost.com will debut a redesign that will more effectively showcase multimedia content -- a prime focus for the organization at this time, Little says. "We're using Brightcove so it plays in the main window," she said.

Regarding blogs on the Post and Newsweek sites, Little reports that, despite the controversy surrounding their politics and opinion blogs from time to time, their "panel blogs" have been by far the most popular.

A classic example of this approach is PostGlobal. According to that blog's about page, here's how it works: "At least twice a week, we'll post a question then solicit responses from members of our diverse network of experts, whose combined views, we believe, will reflect what the world thinks about important issues more quickly and completely than would those of any single commentator. We will also post comments on the question from readers around the world, highlighting the most interesting."

Little added that currently the OnFaith panel blog on religion is attracting a remarkable amount of attention and high-quality discussion.

At the BlogHer small group discussion, there was considerable interest in how the Post handles opinionated bloggers and flame wars in blog comments. Little was frank about the organization's learning process. Referring to a recent controversy over a blog posting widely criticized as insensitive toward U.S. military personnel, she admitted, "That should have been edited out. ...We let our bloggers have their voices, but we do have oversight too. We're still learning how to do this."

More generally speaking, Little said, "I object to people who say there shouldn't be opinion on the Washington Post site. We think people are smart enough to figure out what's news and what's opinion."

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