The Post attempted to move into hyperlocal journalism in 2007 with LoudounExtra.com, a site devoted to Loudoun County, Virginia. The site struggled to find an audience. In 2009, its creative team having left the Post, Loudoun Extra closed.

In September 2009, the Post issued a set of social media guidelines emphasizing neutrality and objectivity by its reporters and editors. The guidelines were met with mixed reaction, some questioned the objectives, some panned the rules and the implications for the newsroom, others supported it.

The Post also was criticized for its “Mouthpiece Theater” video series in 2009, starring writers Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza. The series was pulled after a video mocking Hillary Clinton and other politicians stirred criticism.

In 2009, the Post launched Story Lab, a blog that experiments with new narrative forms in its reporting and presentation.

The Post fired popular liberal blogger Dan Froomkin in June 2009, though it has hired other prominent liberal writers, including Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein, to contribute to its website. In August 2009, Post writer Ian Shapira began a discussion about aggregation when he accused Gawker of stealing one of his stories through heavy block-quoting of it.

The Post’s breaking-news blogging and aggregation initiative, blogPOST, came under fire in 2012 when one of its bloggers resigned after being caught plagiarizing. The site was accused of pushing its young reporters too hard to blog quickly without enough guidance.

In April 2010, the Post launched a redesigned politics section that emphasizes social sharing and interactivity and is designed to compete with Politico. Shortly thereafter, the paper also started a network of user-created political blogs.

The Post released an iPhone app in March 2010: It initially charged $1.99 per year but made the app free about a year later. In November 2010 the Post launched a free iPad app, and in March 2012 it launched a politics iPad app, which is free to download and use but costs $2.99 per month for full access. Post officials said in 2010 that they have no immediate plans to charge for the rest of their online content.

In April 2011, the Post launched Trove, a news aggregator that mines users’ Facebook data to deliver personalized content. Later that year, the Post became one of the first news organizations to launch a social news app inside Facebook — drawing 3.5 million users in its first two months — and also released an Android-based app. It has used the Trove technology to experiment with personalized headlines.

The Post’s executives have said they have no plans to launch a paywall for their online content.

Salons scandal

In 2009, Post officials circulated plans to offer lobbyists exclusive off-the-record meetings, or “salons,” with government officials and Post reporters and editors for a cost of up to $250,000. The meetings were to be held at the home of Post publisher Katharine Weymouth. The plans were canceled soon after Politico reported on them.

The proposal was met with strong criticism from within the Post and elsewhere in the industry. The Post’s ombudsman called it “an ethical lapse of monumental proportions,” Weymouth apologized to the Post’s readers, and an internal investigation was launched. Two months later, the marketing executive who helped organize the salons resigned.