"Frontline" prepares to move online

"Frontline" has hired a veteran newspaperman to help prepare the show for the post-broadcast world. As radio and television move online, there will be a convergence with text. Perhaps this is where the writers, marginalized by shrinking print products, get their second life. Huffington Post

AOL readies the axe (*updated)

AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million. The deal went through Monday. Today, All Things Digital reports that AOL plans to "lay off up to several hundred staffers starting tomorrow" and that the targets include editorial employees. Some of the layoffs are meant to clean up "redundancies" caused by the Huffington Post acquisition. The report also hints that certain areas of the country, perhaps where AOL media is having a hard time getting traction, will see cutbacks.

*Business Insider got hold of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's memo to employees. Turns out 900 employees will be canned overall, 200 of them on the editorial side. An example of Armstrong's spin: "The structural changes at AOL are possible because of the progress we have made as a team in the last 12 months." Progress leads to layoffs in the corporate world.

Meantime, Arianna Huffington, now editorial director for all of AOL, has some plans of her own. Again, from All Things Digital:

Sources said she is likely to be making some dramatic changes, likely to be announced soon, to the way editorial products are created and presented to consumers.

The vague "dramatic changes" is enough to send shivers up most people's spines, especially when preceded by layoffs and prepared by someone who thinks exposure is a good substitute for a pay check. However, given AOL's own track record at handling editorial content (see here), the changes could be an improvement.

Investors don't seem to be betting on AOL-Huffington Post deal

AOL's stock dropped to a new low on the same day that the $315 million purchase of Huffington Post closed. Is this coincidence or commentary? The Los Angeles Times speculates:

The decline in stock price may show a lack of investor confidence in Chief Executive Tim Armstrong's attempt to turn AOL around. Much of that plan is pinned on the combined vision of Armstong and Arianna Huffington, who is becoming president and editor in chief of a new Huffington Post Media Group inside AOL. 

AOL, looking to capitalize on the success of the Huffington Post website and brand, is putting the majority of its online publishing properties under Huffington's control.

(found via fishbowlLA)

Four in the morning

1. Utah wants to limit the pesky public from making requests for public documents. Poynter

2. Huffington Post names six new reporters, including former Yahoo-er Michael Calderon. Romenesko; Arianna Huffington says "meh" to the threat of unpaid bloggers going on strike (i.e., some people doing free work deciding not to work for free). fishbowlLA

3. Most media outlets are the worst at covering themselves - still, the New York Times ombud says it's about time the paper did some reporting on its highly anticipated paywall plan. NYT

4. For those living and voting in Los Angeles, the city will suspend parking restrictions on Election Day. City Maven (found via LA Observed)

Four today

1. Media companies making billions by convincing the masses to whitewash their fences - for free. NYT

2. Glenn Greenwald doesn't like Jim Rainey telling Anderson Cooper not to use the word "liar". Salon

3. Jimmy Orr, former internet strategist for President George W. Bush, was promoted to managing editor, online, at the Los Angeles Times. LAO

4. Huffington Post writer Jason Linkins says he gets a paycheck and has deadlines, so there's no need to pay the bloggers. HuffPo

CPAC protests AOL over Huffington Post deal

Conservatives at the CPAC conference are calling for a boycott of AOL after the company purchased the liberal website Huffington Post. A photo of the flier is here.

Four in the morning

1. There's some news out of Egypt today. NYT

2. LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich wants to get tough with political protesters. LAT

3. Huffington Post economics editor Peter Goodman explains the Huffington Way of coverage. HuffPo

4. The low bar of getting a story on Gawker. Capital New York (via Poynter)

SEO vs. the paywall

Farhad Manjoo at Slate wonders if the AOL-Huffington Post deal could falter as SEO loses its mojo inside Google's search algorithms. HuffPo can attribute much of its success to cutting down big stories into digestable sizes and then search engine optimizing the hell out of them. To explain how it works, Manjoo offered the following summary of the AOL deal to buy HuffPo:

Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News.

 Meantime, Felix Salmon says AOL-HuffPo will eventually beat the New York Times and compares the former site to walking through Times Square while the New York Times is like going to the library - and finding out it costs to check out a book. Here's Salmon's concluding graphs:

One of the paradoxes of news media is that most of the time, the more you’re paying to use it, the harder it is to navigate. Sites like HuffPo make navigation effortless, while it can take weeks or months to learn how to properly use a Bloomberg or Westlaw terminal. Once the NYT implements its paywall, it’s locking itself into that broken system: it will be providing an expensive service to a self-selecting rich elite who are willing to put in the time to learn how to use it. Meanwhile, most Americans will happily get their news from friendlier and much more approachable free services like HuffPo.

Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable editorial technology, then, the NYT is sticking its head in the sand and retreating to a defensive stance of trying to make as much money as possible from its core loyal readers. There’s no growth in such a strategy. Indeed, the opposite is true: the NYT is making it both hard and expensive to become a core loyal reader. Meanwhile, the open web will become ever more accessible and social, with friends pointing friends to news in a site-agnostic manner. The NYT is distancing itself from that conversation, standing proud and aloof. It’s a strategy which is doomed to fail.

Four in the morning

1. The AOL-Huffington Post deal is great, as long as you don't care much for journalism. LAT

2. If you have the data, the guvment will help you map it. IssueMap (via Nieman Lab)

3. Arianna Huffington trumpets the AOL-Huffington Post deal; Marc Cooper and others analyze the consequences for online and offline news operations in Southern California. WWLA?

4. Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. New Yorker

The view from New York

New York Times media writers Brian Stelter and David Carr discuss the AOL-Huffington deal. It's short and to the point, with a cliffhanger of an ending. The link is here.

Mixing metaphors, and Huffington Patch vs. NewsBeast

AOL's purchase of Huffington Post is a fascinating case study of old and new media feeding off one another in a strange orgy of mutual cannibalism - legacy eats innovator eats legacy; pay eats no pay eats pay. It seems so incongruous, and yet so dirty natural as to be inevitable.

Here is Arianna Huffington, maven of the progressive blogosphere and mistress of the skimpy or nonexistent paycheck, and AOL, a company mostly associated with dial-up Internet and a panicky but paid-for venture into local news, making common cause to take on the likes of Yahoo News and NewsBeast (the royal marriage of the money-losing Newsweek and Tina Brown's mostly paid-in-exposure Daily Beast).

On one hand, we have once mighty media companies struggling to survive on a model of paid news staff who generate original content and, on the other, surging media companies that have learned to harness the power of ideological branding, agenda journalism and exposure-as-compensation to drive enormous traffic, though without the ad dollars to match. Given the triumphalist social media chatter, one would think the likes of HuffPo and the Daily Beast would leave their crippled ancestors to die upon the banks of the primordial swamp; instead the oldster companies have swallowed their offspring to serve as a sort of mitochondrial life force.

Which raises the obvious question: Will most or all of the writers and bloggers working for these hybrid media empires get paid? Even Dan Gillmor thinks they should.

And some writers do. Before Huffington Post and the Daily Beast got gobbled up, they'd hired veteran journalists from the likes of Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post to invigorate their journo credentials and gain seats at the pundits' tables. Howard Kurtz, who worked at the Washington Post, which sold off Newsweek, has gone to the Daily Beast. Howard Fineman, who worked at Newsweek, which merged with the Daily Beast, is now senior politics editor at Huffington Post.

This feels like the kind of viral cross-contamination that has to happen for online media to move forward, though the evolution/mutation is far from over.

In strictly business terms, AOL-HuffPo has a built in advantage over NewsBeast. Huffington Post is more popular than Daily Beast and AOL has a large stable of news sites, such as TechCrunch and the relatively new Patch network, both giving AOL a foot in the niche/hyperlocal markets. These sites now fall under Arianna's editorial guidance. She's proven extremely adept at managing a single brand, her own, but can she manage multiple brands with different editorial missions? Or does everything AOL go The Huffington Way?

(edited)

Rep. Harman heads to think tank

Rep. Jane Harman, D-El Segundo, will announce tomorrow that she is leaving Congress to head the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars think tank. Her departure leaves Democrats scrambling to find a suitable replacement (The City Maven tweeted that LA Councilman Janice Hahn has already announced she'll run and Marcy Winograd, president of the Progressive Democrats of Los Angelse, has been mentioned as well).

Harman, who sits on the influential House Intelligence Subcommittee, is a staunch defender of Israel and a reliable hawk. Her departure opens the door to Democrats who'd like to see a more liberal person in the seat. It's unlikely Republicans will be able to take the South Bay district,  which runs from Venice to Redondo, then curls around the Palos Verdes peninsula to take in part of the Port of Los Angeles.

Harman's husband is Sidney Harman, who recently bought Newsweek magazine, which he quickly mated with Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, and which will probably be a prime competitor against the newly formed AOL-Huffington Post and Yahoo News. Thus begins the battle of the Howards (Howard Fineman, formerly of Newseek, now at Huffington Post, versus Howard Kurtz, formerly of the Washington Post, which sold Newsweek to Harman, who is now a Daily Beast writer).

Four in the morning (the Huffington Patch edition)

Did AOL just pay Arianna Huffington $315 million to figure out how not to pay its writers? This and other questions mulled in today's AOL Way-HuffPo roundup:

1. Huffington and her cohorts say the deal will change nothing and everything, "it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet." Atlantic

2. Ken Auletta on Tim Armstrong's "Hail Mary Pass." New Yorker

3. Nick Denton calls the Huffington Post "remarkably ugly" (scroll to bottom of Q&A). Atlantic Wire

4. Gawker makes fun of the whole thing. Gawker

AOL to buy Huffington Post*

AOL, which has tread heavy into the content arena with AOL news staff and its Patch sites, has agreed to buy Huffington Post for $315 million. Arianna Huffington will continue to lead HuffPo, Reuters reports. The deal calls for AOL and HuffPo to integrate content. From Reuters:

"The acquisition of The Huffington Post will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers," said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and CEO of AOL.

*The New York Times reports that Arianna Huffington will run editorial operations for the entire AOL network, not just the Huffington Post content. From the story:

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

One has to look no further than "The AOL Way" to know that AOL could use some editorial guidance. Whether Huffington is the one to provide it is another matter. Here's more from the New York Times has more:

While Huffington Post has been growing — it now employs more than 200 people, a threefold increase in just the last few years — AOL has been shrinking. Last year it eliminated close to 2,500 positions, roughly a third of its staff. Although its most recent earnings estimates beat Wall Street expectations, revenues for the fourth quarter were down 26 percent from a year earlier as dial-up customers continued to disappear. Ad revenue, which is seen as the company’s main business going forward, was down 29 percent from the year before. 

-snip- 

The Huffington Post, too, has faced criticism over its content, much of which is aggregated from other news sources. But it has started to invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets. By acquiring The Huffington Post’s reporting resources, AOL hopes to counter the perception that it is a farm for subpar content.

Goodman brings the ruckus to Kaplan, WaPo*

The Huffington Post's Peter Goodman, a former national economics correspondent of the New York Times, writes that the Washington Post risks its hard earned reputation as a solid journalistic institution because of its dependence on the for-profit Kapalan Higher Education business. From HuffPo:

The Kaplan name has been doing no favors for the Washington Post's reputation or that of the Graham family. As HuffPost business reporter Chris Kirkham detailed this week in a hard-hitting piece drawing on former Kaplan insiders, management has employed deceptively aggressive marketing practices to recruit students, while enrolling many in classes without their knowledge, enabling the company to pocket a larger slice of the federal financial dollars that comprise upwards of 85 percent of their tuition revenues. 

Like many schools in the thriving for-profit college industry, Kaplan has churned out graduates with debts most cannot hope to repay, given the meager wages they will likely earn. Indeed, Kaplan's graduates have wound up defaulting on their federal student loans at roughly twice the rate of counterparts at non-profit university programs.

*Sorry, left out the story link. It's here.

Four in the morning

1. The MOCA whitewash story is waiting to break nationally. fishbowlLA

2. The battle over the Hollywood farmer's market. Which Way, LA?

3. AOL's Patch opens another shop in Long Beach. LA Observed

4. Huffington Post says it will turn a profit. Bloomberg

Four in the morning

1. Former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon wins a "genius" grant largely for his work on "The Wire." Baltimore Sun

2. Huffington Post to Mayhill Fowler: "How do you resign from a job you never had?" Yahoo

3. NPR praises the LA Times for Bell stories. NPR

4. Tonight's gubernatorial debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman airs live on KCRW 89.9, followed by political analysis on "Which Way, LA?" WWLA

Fowler wanted to get paid to do her job

Mayhill Fowler got a lot of attention for herself and for Huffington Post when she quoted then-candidate Barack Obama saying that some folk cling to their guns and religion. But HuffPo never hired her as one of its paid reporters, choosing instead to offer her a "platform" in lieu of real money. So she's quitting as loudly as she can.

Here's part of her parting shot:

The Huffington Post business model is to provide a platform for 6,000 opinionators to hold forth. Point of view is cheap. I would never expect to be paid there when the other 5,999 are not. However, the journalism pieces I have done in the past year seem to me as good as anything HuffPost’s paid reporters Sam Stein and Ryan Grim produce. Why do they get money, and I do not? I don’t recall either of them writing the story about Barack Obama waxing large on “clinging to guns and religion,” which seems more and more as time goes by to be the one big story out of the last presidential election to live on. Or at least it is the one that journalists and pundits are quoting regularly now. ... 

 She continues on at length before getting to founder Arianna Huffington:

Don’t get me wrong.  Arianna has many wonderful qualities.  I especially admire her wit and her continual reinvention of herself, in that classic American (especially immigrant American) way.  But she is also the quintessential opportunist.  And I cannot help but feel that, at the end of the day, as I thought I was proving myself to her to be worthy of journalism, she on her part was milking me for everything she could get before letting me go.

 (found via LA Observed)

Huffington Post gets Goodman

Peter Goodman, national economics correspondent for the New York Times, has decided to leave the paper to become business and technology editor at the Huffington Post. Goodman told Howard Kurtz that he wanted the freedom to advocate solutions to the nation's economic woes rather than simply report on them. His reporting, by the way, has been consistently excellent throughout the Great Recession and gives me a reason to actually read the website.

Huffington Post thinks the revolution runs through the mainstream

The Huffington Post has savaged the mainstream media for being out of touch. To prove the point, the website has hired the epitome of mainstream news, writer and political Howard Fineman, away from Newsweek.