Over the past few days, there’ve been a few changes at washingtonpost.com, in the form of new content and new partners. Here are the highlights:
On Monday, WPNI launched its latest weblog, “Focus on Fairfax”. It’s an attempt to bring some hyperlocal reporting to the website, and is overseen by Post editor Steve Fehr, who also edits the Fairfax Extra section of the newspaper. As FishbowlDC pointed out, the launch just happens to encompass one of the territories already covered by Backfence.com, which makes me look oddly prophetic. Still, I’d imagine there’s plenty of news to go around, and hopefully the Post will avoid stepping on anybody’s toes. Ideally, this is the sort of thing Express would cover as well, but I don’t know if they really have the resources right now to handle it on top of putting the paper together. Maybe someday, though.
More recently (like, today, actually) the site debuted a new Opinion section, renamed “Opinions”, which ties together the commentary sections on the site along with several new weblogs (including one by Bert Stover, WPNI developer and all-around good guy, on his experiences gearing up for National Guard duty) and the paper’s editorial cartoon sections. From a design standpoint, I personally think it’s a cleaner look, and I wonder if it’ll spread through the other sections at some point. (I believe Alyson had a hand in the design work as well.)
Finally, the Technorati partnership launched this week as well. This is something that was covered internally at an all-tech meeting last month which I missed, thanks to my work schedule and a tendency for Oracle Calendar to helpfully forget to notify me in advance of such things. Anyway, the short version is that there’s now a sidebar on many Post articles that includes Technorati-powered links to weblogs which in turn link to the article in question. That way, readers can see who’s discussing the article online through a Technorati search. It’s similar to the Newsweek search launched last week, which shouldn’t surprise anyone considering both online media properties are owned by the same company. I think it’ll be a handy way to boost awareness of an article, similar to how the Feedster Story Expander worked. (It’s not a Holovaty special, though, since as far as I know he hasn’t officially started yet.) The real test will be in seeing how the Post handles negative comments on its articles; I have to believe they won’t be censored in any way, but I suppose that’s open to debate.
Anyway, these are some of the things that we’ve been working on as of late, although when I say “we” I really mean “people other than me who make actual decisions and whose ideas and designs drive the direction of the website and by extension the company” — remember, I’m just a cog in the great machine. (It’s still cool to watch it all happen, though.)
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My design contribution to the Opinions section was churning out those columnist icons (five different images for each columnist). Brian, the news design manager, was responsible for the overall section design, and Nelson worked on the Toles vs. Toles feature. Props also to the folks in Production for figuring out how to CSSify this thing; I hear that some parts of it were pretty challenging to pull off.