With Trove, Ex-WaPo Labs Team Takes Another Try at Social Reading
How do you get your daily news? — It's a question that any 21st century news organization is asking itself — a question all too familiar for a guy like Vijay Ravindran. As the chief digital officer of Graham Holdings …
Context & Ripple Effects
Trove is the third high-profile swing in this corpus at rebuilding how people consume news online. Google tried with its 2009 Living Stories format experiment, and GigaOM asked in 2011 whether a newspaper could think like a startup when profiling NYT Labs — both attempts framed news reading as a product problem rather than an edition problem.
What distinguishes this launch is who is behind it and where it sits: the ex-Washington Post Labs team operating outside the newsroom, backed by Vijay Ravindran in his role as chief digital officer of Graham Holdings. The pickup was unusually broad for a consumer launch — TechCrunch, The Verge, PandoDaily, Business Insider, PC Magazine, the Washington Post itself and NYT Bits all carried it on launch day, signaling that press-side observers saw the Labs spinout model, not just the app, as the story.
First-order effects
- The ex-WaPo Labs team now runs an independent venture under Graham Holdings rather than an internal lab project, meaning its product bets live or die on user adoption instead of publisher patronage.
- Readers gain a dedicated social-reading product that competes directly for the same attention slot occupied by social feeds and aggregator apps on their phones.
Second-order effects
- Publishers whose headlines flow through Trove's curation layer must decide whether the app is free distribution or an intermediary capturing their reader relationship — the same tension that has shadowed every platform play since AOL's 2007 blog-styled news relaunch.
- Other newspaper R&D groups face pressure to justify themselves by shipping ventures of their own, since the Graham Holdings model offers Labs teams an exit path from cost center to company.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, newspaper companies increasingly separate product innovation from newsroom operations, spinning labs into ventures that curate and distribute journalism they no longer exclusively produce.
- A successful social-reading layer would shift some editorial gatekeeping from publishers' front pages to reader-controlled curation tools, weakening the homepage as the unit of news distribution.
The trend: News organizations keep attempting to own the reading experience through product experiments — formats like Living Stories, internal labs like NYT Labs, and now independent ventures like Trove — as they try to reclaim audience relationships from social platforms.