A question on the level of Integration with the newspaper – there are two separate organisations, she says. The newspaper building is old, a little worn, the founder’s picture is on the wall. The interactive organisation is in Arlington in a steel and glass building. However, she says, there is a lot of interaction – several video conferences between the news teams each day. However, “we still step on each other’s toes.” Culturally though they are learning how to evolve – particularly where there is a need to cover things immediately rather than wait and consider.

Another question on interaction. “We’ve only had to shut down our comments once”. She says people want to shout at the Washtington Post more than each other.

She also says there is now a lot more “reverse publishing” – blogs written by journalists which then make it into print.

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Caroline Little, ceo and publisher, Washington Post is now on stage. She says it’s 4.30am in the States so she apologies for being half asleep.

Her presentation is entitled “Hyperlocal and International”. It sounds like a contradiction, she says, but it is possible if you understand your audience well. Washingtonpost.com has two home pages, a local page and an international home page. The local site the highest local penetration – 40% – of any site in the US. In total between the two, there are 9 million unique visitors and 250 million page views a month.

“We didn’t know we had an international audience”, she says, but they realised that people were coming because they remembered the Washington Post from Watergate.

The local audience is served by a number of services – a mash-up using Google Maps and various local databases on crime, schools, home sales etc., for instance. In addition they have launched sites specifically relevant to local regions – Loudoun for instance. This is an experiment she says. Another county will follow.

News is important – we have a local blogger who lives in the community. We have a large website which allows us to feed traffic through to the local sites.

The global audience is a different story. Most people arrive by search engine and Caroline says they are working on the navigation “so that people can navigate more than with the back button”.

Washingtonpost.com is using Pluck to add interactive tools (comments and feedback, for instance). Another thing she mentions is the inclusion of “topics pages” – basically landing pages hyperlinked from words on the page. There are about 300,000 and these are automatically generated and optimised for search (done through a partnership with Inform). Also have “most viewed article” and “share” through Facebook, etc.

What is next? Lots. “We are really far behind in mobile compared with Europeans and that’s an area we’re really pushing forward on”. They are also pushing forward with widgets – particularly Facebook. For example the political compass (which tells you what your politics are) got 300,000 downloads in the first month. There was an internal competition to come up with widgets which generated a lot of interest. Another example is the Issue Coverage Tracker.

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AOP chairman Simon Waldman introduced the day. The theme is “Making it Happen”. We’ve all now got real businesses, with real customers and real revenues. Now we also have spectacular ambitions, he says. The challenge therefore is making it happen.

Compere Torin Douglas, the media correspondent of the BBC, introduces the programme.

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I’m at the AOP conference today at London’s Park Lane Hotel. Interesting line up – no easy access to power so it will be interesting to see if I can get through the day.

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Scoble uses the announcement of Adobe’s purchase of Virtual Ubiquity to develop a thesis on the Work 2.0 applications now being developed by a wide range of people. This, he argues, is a real challenge to the hegemony of Microsoft, albeit several years off. Worth a read…

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