Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth* hasn’t quite given up on trying to enlist the editorial side of the Post in more directly revenue-productive activities than the boring old reporting, writing, and editing of news stories.
Today, the newsroom received an e-mail from Weymouth urging everyone to participate in using and promoting Service Alley , the Post’s new website for sharing (and selling ) business listings of contractors, cleaning companies, and such. It’s just like playing around on your social-networking sites, really! Or like being the lowliest zero-commission ad rep ever born:
All,
I am excited to announce that we have just launched our new home services marketplace website, Service Alley. For those of you at the last Town Hall, you know that Service Alley is a place where you can find, evaluate, contact and share home service providers located in the Washington region.
Within the first week of launch, we have been able to get 272 service providers to come onto the site and claim/update their listing, and 14 of those are already signed up to pay us for a more robust profile!
This is a huge potential new business for us (Facebook has even accepted Service Alley into their new pilot registration program), and we really need your help to kick it off. It’s important that we get early activity, and you can all help by doing the following:
(a) go on the site, search for your providers and add them as Favorites;
(b) share, share, share with friends
[CORRECTION: This post originally misspelled Katharine Weymouth’s first name.]
