Interviewer: Hal Espo, President, Contextual Connections, LLC.

Caroline Little, runs interactive division, both WashingPost.com and Newsweek, Slate, The Root for African-Americans, Sprig. Most all sites are news and opinion, 250 million page views at WaPo, 9 million unique visitors/mo. Sites are very standalone from an editorial standpoint but back end is largely shared. Six years ago WaPo was distributed only in DC, discovered national and international audience via online. Slate online-only. Lots of content is shared in large part. On editorial side people recogninize advantages of Internet, Monica Lewinsky story was broken on WaPo.com, online paper is starting to look like a blog. Hard sometimes to focus on smaller businesses when larger businesses are changing so much.

Hal: What have you done to break down barriers between divisions and platforms.

Little: Lots of training, reporters on a beat know can do video, lots of time spent on helping management that fears shifting rewards. Sales feeds across print and online, content feeds both ways, content is also going back the other way, with online content making into print. Big challenges for local papers like WaPo is that there used to be little or no competition for ads or content, that doesn’t transfer online, lots of sources for both content and ad placements for local markets. Not clear that newspapers will get same advantages as national brands. WaPo online audience bigger than paper, but already have 15 to 18 percent of revenues coming from online.

Hal: Locally you compete for advertising with Craigslist for online, are you competing with print for ads?

Little: We’ve seen people migrate already, top newspapers are Gazettes, Express operated by Post, people are going to pick what they want to pick, newspapers are not going to go away but the trend is towards less print reading, kids aren’t picking it up, daughter sent a NYT article to her and apologized.

Hal: New site, why, why now?

Little: Have a high local audience for African-Americans, Skip Gates, professor, founded it with her boss, news, views and ancestry. Skip is involved in helping people trace their roots. One audience that’s been underrepresented. Live three days, too early to tell overall, need to build audience organically, hard to do.

Hal: Where will consumer media look like three years from now?

Little: Disaggregation is taking off, not going to one place to get information. Google is taking market share away, but also partners, and a good partner, Google Maps are really good.

Hal: WaPo used to be a big player, not a big player anymore, what does that mean?

Little: Way more audience than ten years ago, story like issues at Walter Reed hospital matter nationally not just locally, but the hold on ad dollars isn’t there.

Hal: Where do people really come from.

Little: Local audiences tend to use home page, check weather, national comes from blogger links and search, different proposition.

Hal: If you were in the midwest, how would you see things differently?

Little: Yahoo efforts helping local papers to build content, it’s tough for them. As Craigslist grows we still have much larger auto and jobs listings, looking at Monster, career-building. Not going to outrun them overall, but we monitor effectiveness in selected verticals and go for it.

Hal: Facebook, friend or foe?

Little: Adults don’t live on Facebook the way that kids do, have done a few widgets, tried to invest. Yields a fair amount of traffic, but did it a lot just to let people know that you’re out there.

Hal: How do you exploit your natural advantages.

Little: Haven’t really refined home pages, real redesign, looking at if you only had a local audience how did it look like, if you only had a national audience what would it look like. National audience really interested in opinions, so that will go “above the fold” in online edition.

Hal: What are your peers doing that you’d like to emulate?

Little: NYT does a great job with search engine optimization the past few months, Guardian.uk innovative, beta tests across site, opened up a lot to users.

Hal: WSJ – impact of subscription barriers changing?

Little: Murdoch says subscriptions stay, but NYT raised barriers successfully.

Hal: User-Generated Content?

Little: First site with comments, relationship with Pluck, in March you’ll be able to upload photos, videos coming.

Hal: You’re a lawyer, what’s the state of IP law?

Little: Fair use is becoming broader than anyone anticipated, like to see proper attribution.

Question: Disaggregation of news, but RSS readers aggregate things again.

Little: More opportunity for news organizations to aggregate content from others, more ad networks.

Question: Licensing multimedia?

Little: More people watching multimedia, got a national Emmy award. Even with that said, we can’t compete with a network [comment: But you don't have to, just choose the right channels].

Question: What is your financial model, will you be a Murdoch?

Little: Working for someone invested in the long haul, profitable for fourth year, biggest challenge is to keep investing in rapidly changing technology. Management breathes internet, the Kaplan group does a lot of online universities, they taught us about pay per lead and metrics, historically content has not been metrics driven. Inform is terrific, builds pages and topics on the fly, but needs to be more friendly for SEO purposes. Helps to drive people to site.

Good interview, Hal keeps the questions coming and coming and there were good audience questions. It’s a good example of a strong local news organization with national impact that is still struggling to find growth in spite of being profitable. Caroline touched on one of the key issues when she mentioned the rise of ad networks. They have broken papers’ lockhold on local ads and created far more competition for national and global ads. They are reluctant to move into virtual aggregation of local content and becoming ad networks in their own rights, yet that’s where the money is going. Newsrooms are great resources, but I think that they’d do better to have those desks spend more time on virtual aggregation and focus in-depth on content that’s most valuable in the moment.

- John Blossom, Shore Communications