Secrets of Arianna Huffington
August 8, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
She has shaken up American political media with her website the Huffington Post. But by revolutionising news, might she also be in danger of destroying it? – asks Prospect magazine.
”Cult of the Amateur” author Andrew Keen wrote an interesting profile of Arianna Huffington and an analysis on the success of her website - a hybrid of a traditional newspaper, a news blog and a curated news search engine:
- How the Huffington Post is changing the economics of public intellectual life: ”Huffington invented a simple but innovative model for squeezing value out of a network of branded intellectuals. She convinced her friends—names like Norman Mailer, Edward Kennedy, Richard Dawkins, Nancy Pelosi, Mia Farrow, John Cusack and Christopher Hitchens—to provide opinion for free. Once this content had been published on an easy-to-navigate website and links to other newspaper websites added, a frenzied virtuous cycle ensued in which audience created more audience and celebrities begat more celebrities, each feeding the other.”
- About the economics of aggregation: ”Internet businesses such as Google, YouTube and Facebook are defined by their ability to generate large quantities of free content and then to sell advertising from the traffic that follows. The potential of these business models explains the generous valuation of many Web 2.0 companies. (…) The traditional media business model is the reverse of HuffPost’s. Conventional publishers must pay not only writers, but editors, fact-checkers and other intermediaries. HuffPost, in contrast, rarely edits its contributors’ work, and so its editorial staff is minuscule. The business needs just 50 staff to manage a website with millions of visitors a month. (…) No wonder the conventional newspaper business is in crisis. Lightly staffed websites like HuffPost are siphoning off both readers and advertising.”
- How the Huffington Post finds authors who write for free? ”Most of HuffPost’s content is produced by unpaid contributors. So how does she do it? Why do HuffPost’s authors write for nothing?
The answer gets us to the cultural heart of the Web 2.0 revolution. In the December 1997 issue of Wired, Silicon Valley futurist Michael H Goldhaber wrote an influential essay entitled “Attention Shoppers,” which suggested that the great scarcity in the 21st-century digital media economy will be attention. Where information is effectively infinite, intelligent people will be involved in a Darwinian struggle to be heard above the digital cacophony. (…) Celebrities write for free on Huffington’s site to advertise themselves, to raise awareness of their personal identities, to sell their speaking services, to get book deals, to hawk their new movie or to show off their technology start-up. The more interesting their opinion, the more eyeballs they get and the more value they add to their personal brand.” - About the dangers for journalism and for democracy: ”As professional journalists are replaced by opinionated celebrities competing for recognition in the attention economy, how will an Arianna Huffington, blogging from her home in Brentwood, LA, know what’s happening in Tehran or Washington? As newspapers shut down their foreign desks—something that is already happening—how will we Huffington readers know whether to trust the accuracy of her work? At the moment, HuffPost works because the luminaries on Huffington’s network have access to the reliable information derived from professional news journalists and commentators. But as the traditional newspaper business withers, media is liable to degenerate into a surreal Ponzi scheme of digital illusions and delusions where empirical facts will be replaced by opinion and professional news gatherers by commentators-with-attitude. This represents a real threat to representative democracy. In a society where nobody can reliably know what is going on, it is hard to act as a good citizen or to vote in good conscience on the performance of our politicians.”
- Can ”citizen journalism” be a solution? ”HuffPost’s solution is to go back to Huffington’s compatriot Aristotle and his communitarian theories of citizenship. If the political community (the polis) is undermined by the crisis in news reporting, then we all have a responsibility, as citizens, to report the news ourselves. Journalism is transformed into a moral calling. And thus is born the seductive idea of the “citizen journalist”—the ethical man or woman of the new media age. [HuffPost made an experiment - asked readers to cover the 2008 presidential election and publish it under the brand OffTheBus.] While OffTheBus has certainly made an impact, it has also raised worrying questions about professionalism and integrity in journalism. Huffington and [Jay] Rosen [promoter of citizen journalism concept] “hired” Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old failed novelist with no journalism training, to report on the Obama campaign. (…) While at first glance the influence these stories had might suggest OfftheBus was working, in reality it exposes the limits of the experiment. Fowler was less interested in reporting news than in making it herself.”
Andrew Keen is an author of ”The Cult of the Amateur”, a book that tries to convince readers that the Internet and concepts like free and user-generated content are killing our culture and assaulting our economy.
Keen is a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a columnist for many newspapers (ie. the UK Independent) and a frequent speaker.
He writes an internet blog on media, culture and technology.
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Tagged: business model, Case studies, democracy, economics, internet
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