Can Allbritton Communications Succeed Twice in D.C.? TBD

Allbritton Communications chairman and CEO Robert Allbritton is betting that lightning can strike the same place twice, hoping to follow up the success of Politico, which his company launched in 2007 to cover politics in Washington, D.C., with Monday's debut of TBD.com, a community news and information site run in conjunction with the company's area TV stations. Allbritton spoke with paidContent about the launch of TBD.com, and highlights follow: A lot more technology went into it from day one than the original Politico. The original Politico was very much a Web 1.0 kind of site. As long as you could just post stories to something and have reader comments, that was all we really were aiming to do -- and this one does a lot more. About 60 days ago, we finally just had to say we've got to stop throwing new things in here and just get this thing out the door and freeze where we are. It's not so much about technology. It's not so much about graphics or presentation. It's really about the content, and it's really about the stories and the way you can tell stories. Really good content seems to rise above the wrapping and the trappings. That was a huge lesson learned out of Politico, which is, you've got to drive a primary focus for the Web first if you're going to be a good Web site. Politico, we've always thought of it as a Web site that happens to publish a newspaper. TBD is a Web site that happens to program a 24-hour local cable news channel. With increasing desires to have video on the Web, that makes sense for us to do. You're going to see a lot of changes in the content for News Channel 8 on cable TV as a result of this. You're going to see a lot more community-based news. We have the ability, since it's delivered terrestrially over cable, to physically zone it (geographically). With TBD, we're going to attempt to aggressively collect from folks their ZIP codes. I don't want to know any more about you, and the only reason I want to know that about you is so I can deliver news and information that may be relevant about where you live, rather than dumping you into a home page that's got what the editors decided were most important for the entire city.

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Can Allbritton Communications Succeed Twice in D.C.? TBD

David Cohen

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David Cohen