Internet, Washington Post | featured news

The Washington Post confirmed its intention to start charging for access to its website, making it one of the last major American newspapers to do so.

SocialCode, a social media advertising firm and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co., announced Thursday that it has hired 15 members of the engineering team from the social news site Digg. In an interview with The Washington Post, SocialCode chief executive Laura O’Shaughnessy said that the engineers will be working on products that compile and analyze data from social networks’ open graphs to help companies glean more information about their customers. (O’Shaughnessy is the daughter of Washington Post Co. chairman Donald E. Graham.)

Will you soon have to start paying to use The Post’s Web site? No, not in the short term, and maybe never, if I read the tea leaves correctly.

To say that journalism has changed in the last few years is putting it mildly. Those that watch the news industry and have a concern for its future are all too the familiar with the statistics. Dramatic drops in print advertising revenue are followed by layoffs, pay cuts and even the occasional closure of an institution that have informed the public for generations. Meanwhile, an entirely new digital news ecosystem is slowly emerging on the Web and mobile platforms, even if not everybody has figured out the best way to monetize it yet. For a clue about how dramatically things...

Video Professor continues to be angry that I called them a scam in my original Scamville post. They've gotten nowhere reaching out to me directly (more on that below), so now they've tried complaining to the Washington Post, which has syndicated our content since 2008.