On Innovation

News is being increasingly shared through social media, so The Washington Post is making it that much easier for you to share your favorite Post stories with your friends. We are among the first news Web sites to now offer Facebook’s new Send button. With this one-button addition to Network News, the Post’s social platform, we’ve made it seamless for you to send content to a select group of Facebook friends, if you want to. 

This new Send button takes sharing to a different level: a more private level. Washington Post readers can now send content directly to individuals or small groups of friends on Facebook from an article or blog page where they can also publicly recommend a story to all of their Facebook friends. And the decision to send or recommend is still entirely up to you.

As with all new features we add to the site, we want to answer any privacy concerns you may have up front. Please read the Q & A below and let us know if you have more questions by e-mailing us at networknews@washingtonpost.com.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 

1. What is a social plugin? 

Answer: A social plugin is an application that Web publishers use to allow their users to see what their “friends” have “liked,” commented on or shared on social networking sites across the Web. 

2.  How is the Send button different from Facebook’s other social plugins?

The original sketch for the Post’s NCAA Tournament cover was created in early February, with the idea of finding a simple way to emphasize the DC angle this year: stacking all the names of the teams into the shape of the Washington monument and highlighting the eight schools that would be playing at Verizon Center on Thursday.

The turnaround was too tight for a hand-drawing from an illustrator — the field was announced between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday and the first edition deadline for the paper was 9:30. So the type was set up and skewed in Adobe InDesign, then brought into Photoshop and combined with an oversatured image for a surreal background.

Brian Gross / Senior Sports Designer

On Sunday, The Washington Post launched our redesigned Web site. And if you are reading this post, you may have noticed that.

But something you might not know is that we also went through a complete change in our content management system (CMS). This is the underlying system that now powers our site and also our paper product, as well as other productions and platforms.  

We couldn’t have launched on a busier news cycle. We’ve been covering the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami in a big way since early Friday morning. Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said it well in Monday’s morning news meeting while thanking everyone who helped put the new system in place over the weekend: “It was like changing an engine in a moving car.”

We keep rolling out internal changes to our redesign and CMS while pushing out the news. For instance, today we turned on our ability to auto-tweet from inside the CMS. Sounds like a great feature, and it will be. But a glitch caused it to push out over 70 tweets in less than 10 minutes. Of course we immediately turned that off, and senior social media T.J. Ortenzi sent out this tweet:

Brackets. David vs. Goliath. Mid-majors and Cinderella stories. The return of March means the return of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and the biggest office gambling pool of the year. So, how do you win? We’re here to help.

There is little historical data about the tournament that is easily accessible and all in one place. The Post has maintained a database of tournament teams and games for several years, and we decided it was time to overhaul the project and provide a tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

We’ve just relaunched NCAA Tournament Brackets and History, our collection of over 25 years of tournament results, coaches and teams. The project now includes a bracket for each tournament dating back to the expansion of the field to 64 teams in 1985. It made sense to display the data in a form that readers are most familiar with, and it provides a comprehensive set of bracket views that don’t exist anywhere else.

The bracket also features a filter that allows readers to analyze how conference, coaching and previous performance influence tournament success. Many sites provide brackets and results, but we wanted to create a tool that would help inform picks now that the field is announced.

There’s also a search feature that allows you to view the all-time results at a granular level. Try searching by team, conference, coach, seed and bid type to find specific tournament results.

For more details on how we pulled this together, read on…

It’s tricky changing the tires on a moving bus, and washingtonpost.com has been cruising since 1995. The site was an early digital innovator, but technological advances and evolving forms had made it a mishmash of experiences. It was great for the thing you came for, but if you wanted to look around, it was kind of a mess.

This holistic overhaul is designed to make finding stories and moving from one to the next much easier. We’ve grouped similar functions and content, such as related visuals and stories (see below). Here’s an example of how contextual links have changed on article pages: Instead of four zones competing for a user’s attention, we now have one organized area promoting deeper engagement:

On section fronts, we’ve surfaced the depth of our coverage in multiple ways.

Among the mind-boggling factors about the unrest in the Middle East are the speed of the developments and the physical ground that they cover. The Washington Post interactive on Middle East and North Africa in turmoil, created by information designer Wilson Andrews and world producer Sam Sanders, has been fantastically useful over the last couple of weeks in tracking this developing story. I literally find myself going to it daily.

As a digital editor charged with managing daily content and production, I normally shy away from launching complicated projects if they require constant feeding. But the weight of this story, the value of even the incremental updates to be seen in the context of the rest of the Middle East, make it very much worth it. I am happy to say the entire production came out of a daily web news meeting where we talked about the need for context.

The map portion of the interactive “is just the key,” says Wilson. He notes that in creating it, we had to make a choice to have time or location dominate the main visual. But each day’s developments and the spread of the conflicts told us location was truly an more important part of the story. We knew that readers were being inundated with stories about unrest but that the places where changing.

So by design, the map is your key to the day’s content. Each country tab, which correlates to the map when you click in, gives you a recap of recent events (some daily, if warranted). We wanted it to follow and show the developing narrative of each country and of the entire region. It serves as a redux, a place to read-in as well as a contextual visual. Also, a big shout out to Amanda Zamora who helped push for curated Twitter lists to flow in by country. This serves the user, in my opinion, in a way that a feed from a hashtag might not.

As Sam Sanders puts it, “we didn’t just create something cool that we expect people to come to.” We attempted to use the medium and our resources in a way that gets the story to users. It’s an important one.

Cory Haik / Deputy Editor, Universal News Desk

In May 2009, Washington Post staff photographer Michael S. Williamson (aka blues man with a camera) hit the road with reporter Theresa Vargas, traveling across the country to document the recession. 

Now, Michael is back on the road looking for signs of recovery. As Washington fixates on the latest economic indicators, what does the economy look like beyond the Beltway? Are we in a recovery? 

On Recession Road, Michael will test the limits of his mobile production prowess (meet: T.E.S., above, Michael’s new home away from home) to find out, teaming up with Intersect to photocast the recession from his smartphone. We’ll also be asking you to join the story by submitting your own images and stories of the recession at Intersect. 

First stop? Michael starts out in the Maryland suburbs and works his way up the east coast to New England. If you have have suggestions for Michael’s itinerary, Tweet him (@mswontheroad) your suggestions with #RecessionRoad. View the full project at http://wapo.st/onrecessionroad.

Amanda Zamora / Social Media and Engagement Editor

People are engaging with news in a multitude of ways that couldn’t have been imagined even 10 years ago.  Facebook, Twitter and other platforms have turned distribution models on their heads; major news organizations are experimenting with personalization (The Post certainly is with Trove and Ongo); and the iPad allows you to hold a multitude of competing news apps in the palm of your hand.

A list of every radical change happening to the news business needs its own website and those already exist. The goal of @innovations is to help you make sense of the fray and ask you to join it as we write about how our newsroom is changing while we showcase innovations sprouting up around the world.

We don’t want to just tell you what we think. We want to be transparent as we explore and experiment. To that end, this blog is powered by Tumblr and we’re taking our inaugural run at SXSW Interactive.  We’ll post explainers as we launch new digital features. And most importantly, we’ll be asking YOU for your ideas about the news. To kick things off, I’d like you to meet (and follow) the co-pilots of @innovations, who will be curating the web: