washingtonpost.com trip

Brian Katkin
6/11/07
Harvey

Washingtonpost.com is the first online journalism newsroom that I have ever visited. I thought it looked fairly similar to other newsrooms. Before I arrived, I was expecting it to be a little different in that I was expecting it to be significantly smaller with fewer employees.

When Chet was talking to us in the conference room, one thing in particular stuck with me. I thought it was particularly interesting when he said that the way to succeed in the journalism industry is not to continue staying one-dimensional with the journalism tract you’re on now, but to learn something else. For instance, if you’re doing print journalism, start trying to learn aspects of broadcast journalism and vice versa.

With regards to the Web site, I thought it was interesting that Chet pointed out where on the page users are more likely to click. I would imagine it’s a little bothersome to video journalists, like Travis Fox, when well-done video packages (i.e. the Darfur video package) are in places on the page where users are unlikely to click. I also thought it was interesting that washingtonpost.com has so many different types of video players; I would have thought that it would be easier to simply decide upon one and make that the uniform video player throughout the Web site.