The Washington Post, facing serious financial shortfalls, has spent the past year working on new ways to draw more readers to its site, and encourage those who come to spend more time there.
In November, executives rolled out “Ask The Post AI,” an artificial intelligence tool that answers readers’ questions using published works from the Post. The publication has also been experimenting with lower-priced subscriptions, called flexible access, for readers who want to sample its journalism.
On Wednesday, the Post’s top editor said in a memo that the publication would begin piloting another attempt to keep readers engaged: inviting some of the people quoted in its stories to annotate articles they appeared in.
The program will allow only people identified by name in an article to comment on it, and the articles included for now are only those published by the Post’s climate team, according to the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The Post will vet their remarks for accuracy and fairness, and the publication said it also might withhold comments that violate rules against defamatory or obscene submissions. The submissions will appear as annotations, revealed to readers if they click or hover a cursor over the source’s name in the article.
The ultimate aim is to keep readers on the site — instead of having them shift to social media platforms like X and Facebook to have a conversation about a story.
Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Post, said in the memo outlining the program that its aim was to “continue and deepen the conversation about our journalism on our own platforms, rather than losing those interactions to social media, where sources sometimes turn.”
As many publishers in the news industry have shifted their focus from digital advertising to paid subscriptions, executives have prioritized increasing the amount of time readers spend on websites by emphasizing interactive tools like reader comments. This change was foreshadowed by a startup called Genius, which years ago created technology that allowed users to mark up news articles, adding commentary and additional facts.
Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, said the new program could allow the Post to provide its readers with a broader range of views, provided the new submissions were vetted properly.
“Sources sometimes feel like their words are distorted in the journalistic process,” McBride said. “This will give them an avenue to make their message more clear.”
But there are potential downsides, too, she added.
“Most of the sources who talk to The Washington Post are very powerful people who are trying to use their power to shape the country in a way that they see fit,” she said. “And they are masters of manipulation when it comes to messaging and communication.”
Dealing with that will take lots of effort. “The Post will have to devote a significant amount of resources to the fact-checking end of this to make it work,” McBride said.
