Wash Post Uses Web To Entice Readers

An executive at the Washington Post recently outlined the newspaper’s strategy of attracting younger readers to its print edition through the web.

Executive editor Leonard Downie said the Post duplicates the style and content of the newspaper on its affiliated website in the hope that users become accustomed to it and decide to try the full printed version.

Downie also revealed that the Post’s web audience is actually growing faster than its print readership is shrinking, with online turnover now bringing in 15% of total revenue.

The editor was speaking to a visiting committee from the House of Lords which is investigating issues of media ownership.

Details from the group’s US meetings have just been published and include notes from an interview with Rupert Murdoch where he asserted his intention to make each of his publications “platform neutral”.

Murdoch also said that newspaper editors need to be aware of what news is popular with the younger web audiences.

“To illustrate this he explained that Yahoo is the most read news site and if you analyse what news stories are read most on Yahoo it is always ‘soft’ news stories,” states the report.

Murdoch also took the opportunity of the meeting to brand the UK as “anti-success” and claimed the only reason Sky News is not more like Fox News is because “nobody at Sky listens to me”.

The report contains notes from meetings with other senior figures in the US media, such as Paul Slavin from ABC News and Paul Friedman from CBS news, and can be found on the Parliament website.