Since 2013, WP Company has invested in engineering and digital technology, including implementing a research, experimentation, and development (RED) team. The publisher utilizes its own proprietary platform, Arc Publishing (https://www.arcpublishing.com/) as its publishing system and online digital platform.
Site content is organized by topical areas (Politics, Opinions, Investigations, World, Local, Sports, Arts & Entertainment) and major sections. Each article is assigned one or more tags to aid in organization of content, and is further tagged according to type of article (news, perspective, opinion, review, etc.).
The site offers a simple search box at the top of every page. Advanced search features are not available up front, but search results can be filtered by publication date range (past day, week, 60 days, 12 months, or since 2005) or type of result -- article, photo, discussion, graphic, blog story, etc. Results may be sorted by relevance or date. Users cannot further refine results (such as by date range, author, subject tags, or other metadata created during the production process).
Content may be shared via links on various social media platforms or as an email link. Users may add articles to "My Reading List" with an authorized account ('Add This' (+) may not be available on every story). Content may be printed or saved to PDF as individual articles. No additional advanced features such as scholarly citing or permanent URLs are available.
Mobile delivery may vary depending on type of device and application used. For information on apps, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/contents/mobile/
Update on Usage Reports to Subscribers
TWP provides usage reports on a quarterly basis, and they are also available upon request. Usage is tracked, based upon users who access the site while connected to the university’s network (on-site, via their IP ranges or off-site, from behind their proxy or while users are connected to the college’s VPN.)
According to TWP, the following data points are tracked:
Site Page Views:
- Individual visitor who arrives at the web site and proceeds to browse
- Does not distinguish one user from another
- Site visits could be one person visiting multiple times or multiple people visiting one time
- Requires 2-page click-through
Site Visit:
- The sum of site page views over a 30-min period
- The sequence of site page views occurring without a break for at least 30 minutes is calculated as a site view
- A site visit always contains one or more-page views; requires at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted activity
Content Page View:
- The pages visited once the user arrives at the site
- Each individual page viewed is tracked as one content page view
- On average, a single visitor will look at about 2.5 pages
- Requires a 5-page click-through