Washington Times Renews Website and Paper

The Washington Times has recently gone from a 20th Century newspaper to a 21st Century multimedia company that most other news organizations have become.

The Times renovated their website for the first time in about five years and changed the design and layout allow the readers to interact with today’s news.

The website will provide videos and audio webcasts that will be of news stories reported by the Times reporters.

The videos will also include six to eight original shows from popular personalities of the paper. One of the shows will be entitled Food for Thought, where two reporters from the newsroom will have a talk show about current events.

With implementation of these webcasts, the Times has turned its newsroom into a converged newsroom by adding a radio and TV studio.

The changes took place after the hiring of John F. Solomon to be executive editor. Solomon came in January after spending most of his journalistic career with the Associated Press and a year with the Washington Post.

“We took advantage of something multimedia, things I’ve been doing in the industry. AP created the very first multimedia investigation team. Our goal is to liberate reporters from the two-dimensional storytelling to [go to] four dimensional storytelling,” said Solomon.

The home page of the site has more of a horizontal approach than the vertical approach, which the old site had. The user can use a scroll to switch from main story to a different story of the day.

“What we are trying to do with the new website is to put the reader in the driver seat. You can pick your own top story or you can drill down [to] further your experience on the website, doesn’t end when you finish reading our news story.”

The site will also contain a place where readers can interact with the website by adding their own content. The Times added online communities, a social network feature that will allow dialogue around the news with the readers. Each community will have a moderator, known as a civilian mayor, to introduce topics and moderate any misbehavior. The user can also have their own media like videos, audio, and images to integrate in their own news.

The Washingtontimes.com will be up-to-date with the latest stories of the day that blogs will get updated every 20 minutes.

The website was created by world-renowned Roger Black, one of the best in designing news and magazines websites. “If you create [a] live and dynamic news site you’ll grow [the] audience in fairly large numbers,” says Solomon.

Not only was the website transformed, but the paper as well. The daily paper will be larger than the older one. It will contain more national news that will make the Times more of a mainstream news organization.

The Sunday edition will be printed magazine-style to attract a larger readership. Both the daily and the Sunday edition will be changed in design to create synergy between the website and the paper.

The Times will also provide an e-mail subscription for people who can’t get a hold of the paper or prefer to get news directly from their inbox.

There will be a new commentary section called “Solutions” where there will be a liberal and a conservative commentator. They’ll be given the same problem and need to come up with a solution rather than having them argue about it.

The Washington Times has been around since the early 1980’s, as a rival to the Washington Post. It’s one of the leading conservative news organizations in the country.

Solomon concluded, “One of our goals is to grow our audience. There’s a large part of America that shares the same values as the Washington Times, faith, freedom, family, and service. We want to reach and talk to that large segment of America.”

Santiago Leon is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

Santiago Leon