This week Huffington Post suspended one of its writers for extensively rewriting content from AdAge and linking only to it at the end of the piece. Essentially this reduced the amount of referral traffic to AdAge from the giant HuffPo, which in turn decided that its writer needed to be suspended indefinitely.

The episode raised an important issue for digital journalism: How much aggregation is too much in an age of snippets, excerpts and sharing? Yahoo, one of Huffington Post's competitors, has weighed in with an analysis of the situation.

Huffington Post, like most online operations, will borrow enough from a piece to convey its general sense. But its editorial standards create a boundary well short of outright echo. That being said, many saw an inconsistency this week in its suspension of the writer.
1 Comment
 
 
At first, the notion of a paywall seemed silly. Better to take it down and get the traffic.
But when the traffic didn't turn into profit readily, the notion took on new seriousness. For some time now, publishers have been weighing the benefits of reconstructing a paywall to bring revenue.

In his latest post, veteran media and tech executive Alan Mutter notes the arrival of new, well-heeled local players in the game (Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post), all willing to give away content others contemplate placing in behind the paywall. 

Mutter's conclusion: "For anyone other than publishers of mission-critical business or government news like the Wall Street Journal and possibly the New York Times, pay walls will not fly. It is time for everyone else to move on to more productive pursuits."

Those pursuits? Unique products for print, online and mobile, valued by customers and advertisers alike. Charging for day-to-day coverage is not likely "fruitful," he argues on his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.
 
 
AdAge writes about the Huffington Post founder's belief in the four Es of journalism: engagement, enthusiasm, empathy and energy --- and their direction of the digital sphere.

Arianna Huffington argues that user-generated content is the future focal point of journalism. Conventional media need to understand that.

She notes that more video has been uploaded on YouTube in the last two months than if the major television networks had run video every moment of their existence.

She suggests empathic work --- setting about to pursue a cause through journalism --- is attracting companies to do better things with their media spends.
 
 
The release Monday of Huffington Post's partnership with Facebook has touched off a quick response from Slate's Chadwick Matlin, who sees the aggregation/behavioural tracker as the future of journalism.

Essentially HuffPost Social News is going to use Facebook Connects to track the Huffington Post stories and assets you read and share. The implications are substantial for those who want greater insight --- and greater opportunities to monetize --- the practices of those consuming online media.

This application permits you to understand what your friends are consuming, too, which in this era of word-of-mouth-high-value ought to also yield useful data to produce business models.

Matlin asks what will happen if other sites develop this relationship with Facebook. What will be the social network's power in that case?
1 Comment
 
 

Huffington Post has created a $1.75-million fund for the coming year to hire 10 journalists and freelancers to develop stories concerning the U.S. economy. It is the latest entry into journalism through the philanthropic route.

This is being extolled as an investigative journalism initiative, which is always a bit of a danger entering an exercise because it raises expectations. It might be better for HuffPo to simply say it's going to establish a fund for journalism, period. It is, after all, a site with tens of millions of page views each month that depends almost entirely on free submissions. This fund more than doubles its workforce.

The initiative is a partnership with The Atlantic Philanthropies, which focuses on health, aging, population, reconciliation, human rights and youth. Other donors are involved, too.

A strong feature of the fund is that all Web sites will be permitted to carry the results of the journalists' work simultaneously.

 
 

Bob Guccione Jr. has spent a couple of months guest-editing Media magazine. He's sent along something to Huffington Post in which he predicts:
a) Big-city dailies will become free, with charges for home delivery,
b) Internet firms will collapse en masse, making print a successful niche media again,
c) Google will lose market share as others create better search engines, and
d) A cable channel will surpass the four major TV networks due to better programming.
Bold predictions, certainly contrarian.

 
 

Jonathan Dube's interview with Arianna Huffington on Poynter Online provides advice from the hottest (4.55m UVs) news Web site: Get a point of view, be accessible and prompt, and show your decision-making.

 
 

In the end, everything is local.
It should not surprise anyone that Huffington Post, the most successful pure-play online news entity, would shift its attention to local franchising at some stage. Their/her first stop is Chicago, where HuffPost will aggregate local news, blogs and content, but dozens of U.S. cities are on the horizon.
Meantime, Topix has entered into a handful of content deals in listings, apartments, TV and movie listings, business and (yes) pet directories. It's shifting itself from a mainly news to a broader portal locally.

 
 

Eric Alterman's scholarly piece today in The New Yorker examines the tension of the newspaper in the digital age. It is a sympathetic, somewhat nostalgic look at print, but it also pokes into the viability of digital news media and offers a slightly hopeful take on the print future. Like many New Yorker articles, it seeks definitiveness.
He spends quite a bit of time on Huffington Post as a new model worth scrutinizing. He has a fair amount of criticism for the lethargy of change. But he also understands the economic challenge of financing high-quality reporting as advertising revenue fragments and detaches from the conventional media.
Particularly useful in the piece --- at a length only The New Yorker would execute in this hyperattentive age --- is the explanation of the elite/democratic tension inherent in media. Alterman has been a good voice on the loss of liberal media, but this piece parks that perspective --- with one exception, when he notes that the Bush Administration's low rating isn't necessarily echoed in mainstream media.

 
DA25E68FDEC14EAFA7B2A27D26C48058