The ever crafty FishbowlDC has obtained a memo from the Washington Post outlining cutbacks in their online chats. 

WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady sent out the following memo yesterday, which was obtained by FishbowlDC:

Subject: Live Discussion Update All, Just wanted to give you a heads up on some impending changes with live discussions. As you all know, live discussions are one of washingtonpost.com’s franchises. We do more live discussions, with a wider variety of guests, than any other web site l know of, and our live discussion fans are among the most loyal readers of our site. It’s something that’s extremely important to us, and something we have to keep working to make better. To do that, we need to free up the time of its staff. So, to that end, we’re going to soon trim back our schedule of weekly live discussions. There are a host of new things we need to work on, such as video live discussions, better web distribution of our discussions content and a more modern tool to handle the discussions. I’ve asked for and reviewed a list of traffic to each of our discussions for the past year, and after meeting with the Live Online staff, have made some preliminary decisions on cuts. I need to do a little more due diligence, but expect to let everyone know in the next two weeks what we’ve decided to cut. In some cases, we may offer alternative ways for hosts to reach their readers, such as discussion groups (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/community/groups/front.html?nid=ro ll_messboards). Or we may suggest a more ad-hoc approach in subject areas that tend to see spikes based on news. And nothing prevents us from doing one-offs when news warrants it. Anyway, just wanted to send this out so no one was caught by total surprise if they’re contacted in the coming weeks about the status of their discussion. Thanks, Jim

 

What Brady is really saying is that the chats are costing the Post a ton of money in staff time and yielding little revenue so damn the readers. 

In an era of dwindling readership for all newspapersonline ventures which may be costly will be the only way they will make money in the future so Brady and his ilk better watch how they treat their customers.

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