Latest Attempt of a Newspaper to Go Multimedia
Saturday, April 1st, 2006
Under the slogan “Because there’s always more to the story,” WTWP AM-FM, a joint venture of The Washington Post and Bonneville International Corp went on air Thursday launching not only a radio station, but also a continuous promotional vehicle for The Post.
According to this story in The Post:
The station’s premise is that print journalists can be lively radio broadcasters.
That premise struck me as a tall order. But they got lucky on Day 1 when just over an hour after they went on air, they were able to immediately report on American journalist Jill Carroll’s release after three long months of capitivity in Iraq.
But the big question that even The Post itself broached is:
Can it sustain such immediacy and intimacy daily and evolve into what one of its managers has optimistically described as “NPR on caffeine”?
Newspapers are under enormous pressure because by the time they go to print, most of the news is old news. We’ve already heard it on the tube or read it online. So this venture is one way The Post is trying and stem the erosion of its audience/circulation.