I’m really fortunate to have met Vijay Ravindran of WaPo Labs last night. As a former Washington Post employee, and a really big supporter of what that company has built, I was delighted to learn that Vijay is bringing a Silicon Valley sensibility to the newsroom at The Post. 

Here’s what I learned from Vijay’s talk at AU last night: 

Video is a more protective medium (in terms of IP), and rewards the original storyteller much more than the article format, which is parsed out and aggregated immediately upon publication by third parties. Video may be the only really solid way to secure SEO, in other words.

(Fully) integrate new ideas. With a legacy business mentality (which pretty much all companies over five years old seem to acquire), the tendency is to see new technologies as something to build into the right nav (e.g., first generation Facebook ads). Organizations have to rework their mindset so that they are open to full integration, and even cannibalization, which according to the above video is just another term for reinvention.    

Personalization is core. The world is going to more personalized streams of information that can be quickly sorted and sifted to be highly relevant and timely to recipients. (We at 4MeNU completely agree with this notion and are built to address the impending demand.) To the degree that tech and news companies can serve this model, they will secure an advantage.

Create a micro offering. Sometimes you just have to be okay with people only wanting a small piece of what you do. WaPo Labs built The Root 100, which is actually made up of 100 apps that gather and disseminate news about each individual who is part of the Root 100 group. Micro!

Mobile first. Start on phone and work back to tablet and website. This is the approach Vijay’s team took with The Fold focusing on the user experience (in this case cord-cutters) first and then designing with that in mind is critical to creating a product that maps to people’s real-life activities. 

Don’t try to be clever if you’re building a mass platform. This rang so true for me. Vijay said the obvious (which is often underestimated): people are much less facile with online tools than you think, and nobody will get your inside jokes. Stop trying to be so damned smart, and focus on being easy to use.