HuffPost Site Latest Sign of Journalistic Growth Amid Print Downturn
Important Details: As newspaper financial reports descend farther into the doldrums, many observers are asking what’s coming next, what will fill a vacuum forming as newspaper companies slim down and produce less content. The answers are slow in coming, but we see lots of signs – sprouts in some cases – of how journalism is morphing and growing in unexpected ways.
This week, we saw word of further investment – another $5 million for a total of $10 million overall – in the surprising Huffington Post. The blog aggregation site, started by political personality Arianna Huffington less than three years ago, is now the fifth-most linked-to blog site on the web. Huffington has assembled 1,800 bloggers and made her site a go-to must for hundreds of thousands of readers. The site is now backed by 43 full-time employees, and with the new investment, will continue to grow. Its goal: to become less of a politics-centric site and one that includes sections devoted to lifestyles, business, media and entertainment. Kind of like a newspaper.
In an interview in USAToday, Huffington attributes her success to the site’s willingness to reach out, to bring together lots of views in one place. Bloggers receive no pay; instead, it’s the increased visibility and credibility they get that keeps them coming in and contributing. Huffington says she’s a fan of newspapers, as long as they are adaptable. She doesn’t think they are going away.
“Not in my lifetime,” she says. “Papers have to learn how to adapt, so that today’s news, which is read online, doesn’t feel stale the next morning. There’s a very good future.”
News companies as diverse as the New York Times and the Austin American-Statesman, which has been publishing community blogs for awhile, and the New York Times, which recently made Freakonomics its first Times-branded, non-staff blog are beginning to reach out as well.
Of course, blogs are mainly commentary – not reporting. On that subject, esteemed investigative journalist Sy Hersh said this week he thought the future of journalism was never brighter. Pulitzer Prize-winning Hersh is bullish: “We are eventually – and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded. …We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.”
Implications: There’s a lot of very good “stuff” out there. The key is judgment, good old editorial judgment, the kind news people pride themselves on. Outsell believes that these developments show that the game is its early stages here. It’s astounding how many people are willing to share their expertise – at no pay – if it helps them reach an audience. Many publishers are beginning to recognize this phenomenon, adding a few community blogs here and there to their sites. The example of the HuffPost – and of where we can see the Times taking the Freakonomics example – is a further exhortation to publishers to move more quickly. Yes, hyper-local bloggers are good, but consider how many informed, well-spoken community members are out there with expertise and views on everything from local politics to football to local building issues. Harnessing them, under a newspaper brand, is a major key to the future.