Enter the Blog
By 2012 online innovators at mainstream media were focused on blogs as a key to attracting new audiences looking for specialized material or faster dispatches on breaking news. The Post and other big newspaper websites were hosting dozens of blogs on a wide range of topics. In international affairs, some blogs focused on a single country (China, India) or a particular conflict (Iraq, Syria). At the Post, writers from the paper and its sister publication, Newsweek, were paired to discuss world news and foreign affairs in a blog called PostGlobal that is no longer active.
The international blog that eventually became WorldViews began as an experiment in 2012. “We wanted to offer readers an opportunity to consume foreign news in a different way,” said Douglas Jehl, the paper’s foreign editor, “one intended to complement the remarkable work being delivered by our foreign correspondents around the new way.” Post correspondents were encouraged to contribute to the new blog. But not many leaped at the idea. “I felt some skepticism about writing for the foreign blog at first,” said Kathy Lally, the Post’s former bureau chief in Moscow. “Not philosophical questions but practical ones: How much time it would require was the main question.”
Lally’s reaction has been a common one wherever mainstream media have informed staff reporters–including foreign correspondents–that their jobs now included writing for the Web. Unlike the daily paper, delivered just once in twenty-four hours, the Internet never sleeps. The push to move from a legacy schedule to a 24/7 one inevitably meets resistance. “The habits and traditions built over a century and a half of putting out the paper are a powerful, conservative force as we transition to digital,” noted a recent internal New York Times report on newsroom innovation.57
That observation can apply equally to other legacy media, like at the Post where foreign correspondents’ reactions to the new blog in 2012 initially boiled down to this: “You’re asking us to do more work, for no additional pay.” (Correspondents get no compensation for blog contributions.) So, in its earliest days, the Post’s international blog depended on fairly sporadic field reports, supplemented by Web producers working in Washington. It was not the most auspicious start.
That changed with the hiring of Max Fisher, the blog’s first full-time staff writer, who arrived in September of 2012 just two months before the experimental blog was to officially launch as WorldViews. Fisher had never been a foreign correspondent and did not travel for his pieces, but he wrote daily about breaking news abroad. His sources included Post foreign correspondents (feeding information to Fisher was far less trouble than writing an additional story), as well as other news sites, social media, and video from public sources like YouTube.
Fisher developed a facility for synthesizing analysis from public data and previously reported stories–all while remaining in Washington. The result could be both serious and entertaining, like this piece debunking widespread rumors that Kim Jong Un had fed his uncle to hungry dogs.58 Although at times sensational, and occasionally controversial, Fisher probably became best known for explainer posts like “40 maps that explain the world,”59 which were drawing a tremendous number of readers to the blog, and thus, to the Washington Post. In 2013, the Post had over fifty blogs, and WorldViews ranked among the top five in page views. Fisher left the blog in 2014, but two full-time writers continue to staff it. “The conversational, explanatory tone that WorldViews employs has proven to be enormously appealing, by being timely, smart and fun, all at the same time,” said foreign editor Jehl, who worked as a traditional correspondent for nineteen years, reporting from nearly forty countries. Jehl tells his correspondents that there is not much difference between what they’ve done traditionally and what the blog demands: short, small pieces told with a distinctive voice.
At the heart of the digital transition, though, is this essential factor in building a global audience: speed. In the past, a foreign correspondent typically faced one daily deadline. Today, the idea of having an entire day to report a breaking news story sounds luxurious, as then-Moscow correspondent Kathy Lally explained in an email interview in April of 2014. “The other day I covered Vladimir Putin’s annual televised, phone-in question-and-answer session with the Russian nation,” she wrote. “It went on for four hours. I filed a short story after the first hour and missed some things he was saying while I was writing and filing.”
Lally went on to write the main story that led the Post’s website and the next day’s paper.60 Meanwhile, at the blog, WorldViews published even more dispatches, covering both the quirky61 and the newsy62 items of the speech in close to real time. These were written by WorldViews bloggers in Washington with email feeds from Lally in Moscow.
On a breaking news story, that kind of multiple filing, by both Lally and the bloggers, is essential to grab readers who want to know, right now, what’s happening. The blog offers a platform to publish a story, even if it’s still fragmented and developing.
When Israel launched airstrikes near Damascus last May, for example, YouTube videos like this63 became a primary and immediate source for news. In the old newspaper model, the Post and other publications would have worked on a story about this attack for the next day’s edition. But in the hybrid newspaper-digital model of today, the Post’s Beirut bureau put together a story that incorporated the YouTube video, which was already widely circulating on Twitter, added some reporting context and posted it within hours.64
Videos posted on the Internet by activists65 showed a huge fireball erupting on Mount Qassioun, a landmark hill overlooking the capital on which the Syrian government has deployed much of the firepower it is using against rebelcontrolled areas surrounding the city.66
The increased emphasis on speed evokes fears among traditional newsroom editors, who see the need to file and publish fast as a compromise to accuracy. It doesn’t have to be. A successful news operation can do both: Post a few paragraphs of news based on what the reporter knows and then gradually add to it throughout the day. It’s what wire services have done for decades–though today, in traditional print newsrooms, it’s known as digital-first reporting.
Over time, the Post’s foreign correspondents have become more active contributors to WorldViews. Today almost every journalist in the paper’s fifteen bureaus contributes ideas for posts to the bloggers in Washington. Or they may pass on stories or viral videos that are big news in the countries where they are reporting. Some embrace the opportunity the blog offers to tell stories in a more informal voice.
Raghavan’s stories describing wars and conflicts from Sana’a to Baghdad have appeared on the front pages of the Washington Post many times. But in this blog entry following the harrowing day in Nairobi, he wrote in first person, connecting with readers on a more personal level, while still describing the horror on the ground–a mission that a traditional article format doesn’t provide.