Four to break the silence

The blog has been quiet for most of the week, as my new job has required much more of my time. That said, here are some links to get you through Good Friday:

1. Yahoo! News Network helps prove once again that you don't have to best to be first. According to the number crunchers at Poynter, the online network is the top destination for news and information on the web, besting CNN by about 6 million unique hits a month. Poynter

2. Forbes surmises that the unpaid bloggers at Huffington Post provide more value to the site than Arianna Huffington wants to admit. Although they don't drive enough traffic to boost ad revenues in a significant way, they are the reason that Google treats HuffPo as a news site rather than a content farm, Forbes concludes. That means HuffPo stories get ranked alongside the New York Times and Los Angeles Times in a Google News search, rather than pushed down to the Demand Media level. And if you look at the Poynter link above, you'll see Huffington Post is sixth on the list (and partner AOL News is fourth). Forbes

3. As the use of wireless mobile devices increases, the companies that make them want to claim a wider swath of the broadcast spectrum from television broadcasters. The lack of public debate in the process is notable. New York Times

4. The news that Oscar-winning filmmaker Tim Hetherington had died in a mortar attack in Libya came from a fellow photographer's posting on Facebook. Wired

Sports teams increasingly doing their own publicity*

Sports journalism has carried more than a few newspapers through fat and thin times. Readers might intend to care about Congress or city council, but somehow they jump right to the sports page. Television and radio news have similar rhythms. Which is why the push by professional and college sports leagues to hire their own reporters to cover their own business has led to court battles and First Amendment arguments, as Paul Farhi reports in the Washington Post.

Aside from the money issues, this burgeoning battle raises questions about what sports journalism should look like. Is there a more adversarial form the non-team media could employ to counter the in-house PR? Would it keep the audience? Perhaps this new reality could free reporters from the PR transcriptions no one likes to do. But there are risks: After all, people root for "their" teams, they don't often root for Congress. Adversarial coverage could drive people away.

From the story:

“The larger picture is that sports lives in this uncomfortable space between news and commerce,” says Rich Gordon, a journalism professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School. “Journalists want to think of sports as news, but at the end of the day, it’s about entertainment and making money.”

This isn't strictly true. There are cultural and social identity issues tied to sports. Human drama, too. People spend lots of time thinking and watching sports teams for reasons that go beyond simple entertainment. Which is why, having the "entertainment and making money" side of the equation controlling coverage is a bad thing - and why self-reflection is a good thing.

The relationship is already troubling, however. News organizations sometime make deals to ensure their coverage does not impinge upon the money making. As professional sports grow in profits, these conflicts are going to multiply. A possible concern: Do news organizations start making deals to run the sports team-owned coverage on their websites or on air. After all, if the Lakers inside news crew gets the best photos and footage, wouldn't there be a temptation for, say, KTLA, after being shunned from the building, to run it?

More troubling still is the fact that this proprietary coverage is reaching down through college and into high school. Prep sports are the bread and butter of local papers, so this could sting badly. Then there's the nauseating thought of "monetizing" sports teams at public high schools - something budget-crushed districts are likely to consider. But, hey, then newspapers will have something else newsworthy to report on.

*Update: Former colleague Edward Barrera sent me a story that illustrates what happens when sports teams own their own news. From the New York Times:

Chris Botta, who publicized the Islanders for 15 years, had his credentials to cover the team on his blog revoked Tuesday, a day after the last-place franchise fired Coach Scott Gordon. 

“I was about to leave for practice, and I got a text from Kimber saying they would never issue me credentials for games and practices,” Botta said by telephone Thursday, referring to Kimber Auerbach, the team’s manager of communications. Botta said the only reason that Auerbach cited was management’s increasing concern that he had gone from “reporting the news to making the news.”

Oh, and in case you were hoping for some AOL convergence:

Botta spent 15 years in public relations with the Islanders before leaving in 2008 to start his blog, NYI Point Blank, which the team financed for a year. The blog has helped fill a media void for the moribund, publicity-starved team. 

The blog is now sponsored by AOL FanHouse, where Botta is a senior N.H.L. reporter.

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)

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.

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.

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.

"The AOL Way" is to get hits

AOL has a feverish case of hit-count lust. After creating Patch and investing in content creators, as it likes to call journalists, AOL has developed an aggressive plan for profitability that seems sure to grind the hell out of its editorial employees. The Business Insider got a copy of memo (really an excessively jargon-filled power point presentation) that outlines ways to boost traffic. Here's part of BI's summary (the "he" refers to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong):

By April, he wants AOL editorial to increase its stories per month from 33,000 to 55,000.
He wants pageviews per story to jump from 1,500 to 7,000.
He wants video stories to go from being 4% of all stories produced to 70%.
He wants the percentage of stories optimized for search engines to reach 95%.

All of which means many more "stories" from AOL staffers (five to 10 a day is the goal), with a keen eye on money metrics. The plan includes almost nothing about editorial goals, quality, or better coverage. It's machine journalism at its rawest - or what AOL management would call "The AOL Way," a name that rightly deserves to be ridiculed.

One journalist who joined AOL offered this response to Business Insider:

"AOL is the most f-----up, b------t company on earth," says one, who joined AOL in what he calls, "the worst career move I've ever made." 

An October 2010 study argues against turning online editorial into a content farm, saying better stories generate better ad revenue. But the insane valuation of Demand Media, said to be worth more than $1 billion, is certain to change minds.

****

Speaking of AOL's Patch network, I received a message from a Patch contributor who told me AOL plans to cut 30-50 percent out of freelance budgets. I'm not sure whether "The AOL Way" applies to Patch writers, but a smaller freelance budget means community editors will have fewer resources to create more content. Doesn't that sound familiar?

AOL wants Yahoo

The Wall Street Journal reports that AOL and two private-equity firms have joined together to make an offer to Yahoo. The idea is to merge the two Internet companies into something better able to compete with Google. AOL and Yahoo both have invested in online news operations recently as well.

Comings and goings

City Hall reporter Dan Abendschein has left the Pasadena Star-News to become editor of AOL's Patch site for Altadena. Abendschein wrote on his Facebook page that he was told to leave the newspaper a week earlier than planned because of an apparent conflict between his new job and his duties at the Star-News - the town of Altadena is in the Star-News coverage area.

Four in the morning

1. The Wall Street Journal is making googly eyes at Los Angeles, hoping, as the New York Times does, to take advantage of a severely weakened Los Angeles Times. LAO

2. AOL plans to be the "largest net hirer" of journalists next year. Ad Age (via Romenesko)

3. Yahoo and Huffington Post are getting cozy. Beet.tv (via Romenesko)

4. Meg Whitman wants to buy your vote, but you'll have to buy your own drink. fishbowlLA

Little news

Newsweek chronicles the "hyperlocal" movement's attempts to gain a foothold in three New Jersey suburbs. It appears that even though the business model has yet to pay off that the homegrown efforts started by local journalists already are being supplanted by sites owned by national media giants - the New York Times, AOL and MSNBC among them. Why would the majors want to play in the minor leagues? From Newsweek

[I]f an operation like AOL's Patch can link together a network of $200,000-a-year sites each run by a single reporter, and then amortize big expenses (like technology and ad sales) across multiple sites, you could start to see decent profits. The low overhead is crucial: not only are startups like Patch using less costly labor, but they also believe readership and revenue will grow as networks of hyperlocal blogs link to each other, and as they become adept at persuading small businesses that never advertised in newspapers to give online advertising a shot—a key to Patch's strategy.

This model would probably only work in heavily populated suburbs. But it does seem logical that the chain websites would end up chasing revenue from the other types of chains that grow up in suburban landscapes: Starbucks, Ruby Tuesdays, Barnes and Noble, and the like. That, in turn, is likely going to shape how these sites develop.

How's it going online?

It's no surprise that at a digital journalism conference in San Francisco this week the recruiters are mostly from companies like AOL and Yahoo, which are major players in online news. The question is whether these companies continue to ramp up because they've found a successful delivery model, or if they're still in the experimental phase and so we will see many of these jobs disappear in a year or two.