Yosef Malka- Post Visit: Growing Readership

At the Washington Post, our class got an inside look at the strategies the publication uses to grow readership, engagement, and subscriptions. We got to talk to an industry expert with a wealth of knowledge and experience. Mark Smith, the Washington Post's mobile web editor, uses metrics to understand how readers interact with the Post, whether it be on social media, their homepage, or any other platform. Smith showed the class metrics that showed how many people viewed an article, how they got to the article, how long they were engaged by the article, how many times people shared it, and more. Smith explained how important headlines are in driving traffic brought in from social media and getting hits on home page articles. He broke down what makes an effective headline, which is one that makes readers curious about what information they might gain and excited about gaining it.

Smith told us that he will frequently post an article on social media to test out the strength of the headline by seeing whether it drives traffic. If it lags, he will change the headline before putting it on the home page of the website. Upon his arrival at the Post, Smith trained every reporter to write their own headlines. Since Smith was hired, the Post has experienced concrete growth on social media, mobile, and web. His aggressive focus on engaging headlines and captivating pictures have been the hallmark of the publication's approach to digital news. The current home page layout is very strong. The fact that the major stories are bigger in terms of size, but are also found towards the bottom means readers can see what is really important but also get a general picture of what is going on by looking at the categorized articles. The fact that the homepage takes up the whole screen makes it easier to read, and the second horizontal bar is very convenient from looking at trending news. Of course, there are things that the post can be doing better.

I think that they should move local news further down the webpage, because when you open the page, you can only really see five or six stories. For better or worse, the opinion pieces get lost in the middle of the web page. More visuals attached to the home page would make it easier to attract to the reader. The descriptions of the top stories are usually in paragraph form, which does not make it easy to get a feel for what it is about (The New York Times uses bullets). Bullets would be better. More variance in the color font (different shades of black, gray, and blue) would be beneficial in helping the reader distinguish things and thus find an article that will engage them. One thing that I think is missing that I see on other sites is a timeline. A timeline allows the site to just list all the stories they have published in a very small area, which helps people catch up on news quickly. They definitely have space for this on the site, on the right. The right column only contains a few items compared to the other columns, many of them not being related to news.