By Janinne Brunyee
Fast Company recently named The Washington Post as 2015’s most innovative media company. A few years ago, this accolade would have been unimaginable. But, under the steerage of new owner, Jeff Bezos, today The Post is flourishing with 50.5m unique visitors to its website in April 2015 – a 64 per cent increase year over year and 33.7m unique mobile visitors – up 89 per cent year-on-year. This is no small achievement in an industry which is under pressure to reinvent itself to stay relevant, let alone grow.
Fast Company recognizes there has been a much greater focus on The Post’s digital presence in the Bezos era. In fact, the company is now living up to its goal of ”thinking like a digital product company”. This is critical because The Post, along with other traditional print publications faces declining print advertising and a readership that increasingly gets its news from online and mobile devices. According to Pew Research Center, weekly circulation for the daily newspaper sector has fallen 17 per cent over the past decade with a 50 per cent decline in ad revenue.