In January 2000, Jefferson Morley left a position as a reporter for the Metro section of the Washington Post newspaper to take another job within the Post company. He picks up the story from there.

“That’s when I became the World News Editor of the newspaper’s Web site, a journalistic experiment known as washingtonpost.com. Although the job title sounded grand, it was not a position for which there was much competition. That was fortunate for me because I was more a journeyman than a star in the often stellar Post newsroom, and I needed the work.  I had limited foreign reporting experience and I was in no way knowledgeable about computers or the World Wide Web. In those days at the Post, the Internet was a phenomenon mostly of interest to financial reporters and those well-heeled wise guys around the newsroom (I wasn’t one of them) who dabbled in the stock market and spoke, with a twinkle in the eye, of IPOs.

“The world news editor position at washingtonpost.com gave me no budget nor staff (though that would soon change) nor much prestige but it was fascinating from the start. I soon realized that the Internet made something possible that was previously impossible in the history of journalism:  the monitoring of foreign news in real time.

“In the bygone days of the pre-millenium, if you were interested in the news of the world, you had to wait several days, if not a week, to get a copy of the Guardian or Le Monde via what people were starting to call snail mail. Or you had to rely on a foreign correspondent or a New York-edited newsmagazine to learn about  the political and social debates of other countries. No more. As news organizations from Buenos Aires to Tehran to Bejing began to create Web sites, one could read their coverage as soon as it was published.

“I decided I would package the experience. With the benign tolerance of my bosses, I launched an occasional Web-only column  which did something none of my colleagues on the Post foreign desk could do: link washingtonpost.com readers directly to quality news sources in foreign capitals. I called the column, on the spur of the moment, and without much reflection, the World Opinion Roundup.

“My superiors tolerated this extra-curricular experiment, some because they like the idea, others because it seemed harmless. The newsroom for the Post’s Web site, located across the Potomac in Arlington, was mostly disdained by the those who put out the print edition. And we were all well-acquainted with the dismal reputation of foreign news in reader focus groups. “Foreign news is dull, doesn’t have anything to do with my life, and besides there’s too much it” was the usual consensus of any dozen Post readers.  My bosses could comfort themselves with the fact that the dismal future of my little innovation would not be embarrassing.  If it failed, no one in the Post’s management was likely to notice.

“The World Opinion Roundup found unexpected popularity. After September 11, 2001 the the price of ignoring opinion in distant lands became self-evident. Reader demand surged for  commentary from other nations and civilizations. You had to be a fool–or a potential victim–not to pay attention. I had launched, unwittingly,  the sort of thing that would be come to be known as a “blog.” And before long, blogs began to catch on, at least among readers. The novelty of quality foreign news sources made the column a unique a editorial concoction that actually, in the counterintuitive lingo of the day, “drove traffic.” World Opinion Roundup became a regular denizen of washingtonpost.com’s “Most Viewed” and “Most Emailed” lists.

“I ceased the World Opinion Roundup in 2007 (epitaph here) when I left to become the editorial director of the Center for Independent Media in Washington and its network of online state news sites, including the Washington Independent.

“Nonetheless, I never lost the conviction that curating the best in global online journalism would provide a valuable service to the reading public everywhere on the planet. I left CIM in the spring of 2009 to write a book on the early days of Washington D.C. While I do that, I am am continuing to develop the ideas I had first formulated at washingtonpost.com with the present results.  World Opinion Search is a Web 2.0 version of World Opinion Roundup.”

–5 November 2009

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