Washing Post Local Site a Flop

In today’s Wall Street Journal (June 4, 2008) the article “Big Daily’s ‘Hyperlocal’ Flop” is about the Washington Post failing with a local news web site. The problem was the logistics of providing it. In this case an outside team with plenty of experience took it on. So software was not at the heart of its failure. They were not allowed to tie into the resources of the larger paper and failed to find out what the viewers wanted. It sounds like the head of the project was given just enough power to go big on the project, but not enough to make it happen. So the project thought they had resources that they did not. And when they finally realized they were smaller scale than the hype of the project, it was too late.