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

AOL-Huffington might double its Patch force

Arianna Huffington, now the editorial voice behind AOL's news team, has announced the company will hire as many as 800 writers to work on its 800 or so Patch sites across the country, Bloomberg reported. From the story:

“Each site will now have its own team,” Huffington said in an interview. “It’s always greater and better to have a team.” Until now, content for each Patch website has been produced by a single full-time local editor and freelancers.

Teams also help prevent exhaustion from setting in. Individual Patch editors do almost everything necessary to publish their city-based sites. That is tiring and can lead to myopic story selection.

An extra body could also pick up slack for projects, since it's likely there will be Patchwide stories and series. For example, I'm told California's Patch sites paired up with California Watch to help localize the latter's series on earthquake safety in public schools - "sloppy" and "mess" were some of the words one Patcher used to describe the process. It may just be growing pains.

Here's more from the Bloomberg story:

“We are basically going to make Patch a lot more social,” said Huffington, 60. “It’s a great way to have people in the town, from the mayor to high-school kids, engaged.”

That sounds nice. I don't know what it means.

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.

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 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

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)

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

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)

The Huffington Post sectional

The revolutionary Huffington Post seems to be following the old newspaper model in developing sections that focus on different interests. The latest, HuffPo Arts. From Amy Wicks at WWD (via Romenesko):

The section is an outgrowth of the kind of stories that formerly ran in local editions or relevant sections, such as Style. “It won’t be overly formal,” said editor Kimberly Brooks (who happens to be married to filmmaker Albert Brooks, so she should get lots of film world dish). Brooks talked about posting photography of emerging bands and mentioned a new feature called “The Skinny,” which will have the latest on the arts scene, including gallery and museum openings. “The site will also have blogs that people are not normally exposed to,” Brooks added. Senior editor Willow Bay (who is married to Disney chief Robert Iger, so there could be lots of gossip about Mickey, Buzz and Miley) noted that stories about the arts have been popular on The Huffington Post, especially in New York and Los Angeles, and it “felt like the right time” to create a dedicated section.

Four today

1. The future's so bright, I don't need to get paid: Arianna Huffington spoke to the students at Ithaca College and told them she is absolutely positively optimistic and upbeat about the future of journalism and is, in fact, saving it. Ithacan Online

2. Time to cut: Time magazine will layoff around 12 editorial employees as part of Time Inc.'s mandate to cut 500 jobs company wide. Fortune magazine looks to be hit hardest, with 24 newsroom layoffs out of a staff of about 80. New York Post

3. Google and the media: Nieman's Zachary Seward talked to Google CEO Eric Schmitt about his love for newspapers, his definition of blog, and the coming Google Wave. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Obama's brain: Warren Olney will interview Obama's campaign architect David Plouffe about his new book, "The Audacity to Win," and Tuesday's election results on today's "To The Point." Listen live at 12:45 p.m. Pacific here or download is later here.

Four today

1. Is George Will's wisdom really scoop-worthy? Opinionator

2. Bottoms up: Did Gawker trigger a State Department investigation? Bloggasm

3. Apparently it's so easy to dismiss criticism of Ariana Huffington as jealousy that Jon Friedman, in the second part of his glowing two-part series on the founder of Huffington Post, has decided to do just that:

When Huffington speaks, it is sometimes hard to know who is doing the talking. Is it Huffington the entrepreneur? Or the optimistic visionary who routinely triumphs over obstacles, grinning devilishly all the way?

Then again, some in the media who don't like, trust or believe her suspect she has a bit of the carnival barker in her persona. It's easy to chalk up the skepticism to simple jealousy.

4. The line between reinventing journalism and dissembling about journalism is a fine one. This story on Nieman Lab serves as a good example. Wrap your head around this:

Reporting ≠ journalism. Sure, Swart worries about the future of the media. But don’t wait for him to weep for the vanishing beat reporter. He’s been watching the local web, and he doesn’t see an information shortage on the horizon. Instead, there’ll be shortages of reliability, priority and presentation.

Four today

1. Who does David Segal think he is writing about the Weinsteins!? The Wrap

2. Salon.com drops six from editorial department. Gawker

3. Huffington Post and Facebook team up and make social news. BoomTown

4. Former CityBeat and LA Weekly writer Matthew Fleischer ends up at True/Slant. True/Slant

Journalism on the Hill

Here are a short outtakes from yesterday's Senate committee hearing on the future of journalism. David Simon defends the job, Arianna Huffington says its no longer sustainable, economically speaking, and Google says it will send even more people to news websites. Salon

Globe shutdown averted, Senate hearing goes on

The unions representing workers at the Boston Globe have agreed to steep wage and benefit cuts and that should keep the New York Times Co. from shutting down the Boston newspaper anytime soon.

Meantime, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has scheduled a hearing for today at 11:30 a.m. PST to discuss the future of journalism in light of the turmoil at the Globe and elsewhere. As has become obligatory, the panel will include a representative from Google and Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington.

Also slated to speak are David Simon, creator of "The Wire" and former Baltimore Sun reporter; Steve Coll, president of the New America Foundation and former managing editor of the Washington Post; Dallas Morning News Publisher James Moroney, and Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Four in the afternoon

1. The top two editors at the Hartford Courant resigned today. Romenesko

2. Huffington Post founder and LRC co-host Arianna Huffington will receive a lifetime achievement award in journalism from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Gawker

3. The New York Times Co. plays a 60-day game of chicken with the Boston Globe. NYT

4. The New York Times guild is expected to approve a 5-percent pay cut, but expects layoffs anyway. NYO