'WWD' Refashions Its Web Presence

Women's Wear Daily is finally gearing up for the digital age. Maybe this time it'll even take.

Last week, editors and reporters at the fashion-industry trade paper were briefed on plans for a major relaunch of its website set to take place Aug. 4. The goal, says editor in chief Ed Nardoza, is to transform wwd.com from what it is now -- basically an online version of the paper -- into a 24-hour, global news platform.

"We've always gathered info globally -- we just haven't distributed it globally," says Nardoza. "The economics weren't there to distribute it globally, but that all goes away with the internet. We see it as attracting Asian readers and European readers."

WWD brought in the web development firm Razorfish to oversee the building of the new site, which will boast expanded fashion and feature content, blogs, video, and other new offerings.

Those innovative are the sorts of things newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have been doing for the past couple years. But WWD has been slower to embrace the web. In 2001, Fairchild Publications, WWD's then-parent, announced ambitious plans to position the site as a sophisticated data tool with a sky-high subscription price of $895, but those plans were quickly abandoned.

Waiting is no longer an option, however, with sites like Style.com, Fashionweekdaily.com and New York magazine's The Cut increasingly challenging WWD's dominance, especially during the spring and fall collections. (The relaunch is timed to give WWD a couple weeks to work out the kinks before the collections start.) "It's becoming an increasingly competitive news environment," acknowledges Nardoza.

Necessary as it may be, the changes are arousing the worries typically heard in a newsroom where newspaper reporters are suddenly required to be multimedia content creators.

"People are freaking out," says one longtime staffer. "Literally, what they're asking us to do is like double what we've been doing."

Nardoza disputes that, noting that a number of new editors are joining WWD -- including an online managing editor, news editor and fashion editor, and a Tokyo-based editor for Asian news -- to help with the new demands. "We're not talking about people doing two or three jobs," he says. "It's going to be very carefully managed, and workloads will be amortized across the newsroom. My experience is that there's some anxiety, but the enthusiasm outweighs the anxiety."

"I did make a joke about setting up cots in the newsroom," he adds, "but that was absolutely a joke."

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Major double disclosure: WWD is part of Condé Nast, which also owns Portfolio. Also, I worked at WWD from 2004 to 2006.