The Washington Post has always been a leader in the newspaper interactive world and they continue to make very smart decisions.

The article which I link to above shows the way they continue to remain outside the box. Here are a few good comments from Ken Barbieri, Director of Business Development:

From a strategic sense, we came to a realization that investing in bringing eyeballs to our sites was going to be more difficult over time, so we want to deliver our content where people [already] are. We want to be medium agnostic.

In an ideal world, we’d love for them to click through to our site. More and more what you see is this content is going to be consumed where the readers encounter it.

Meeting the audience where they are is a solid strategy. I mention it a lot with regard to business directories. Our primary goal should be to provide our advertisers with a way to reach their potential consumers on any medium. We need to become as close to the ‘One Stop Shop’ as we can.

I believe Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are going to be a big part of driving eyeballs to the local newspaper site and their Marketplace.