The "Oprah" of New Media
I’ve been growling all week at the stream of stories and blog posts dissecting the business angle to the AOL acquisition of the Huffington Post. As if that were all that mattered about this news.
But one post by Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and new media maven, got me barking mad. Now I generally admire Jarvis and didn’t so much mind his fawning assessment of the $315 million deal that will merge Huffington Post with AOL, and make Ariana Huffington the overseer of all AOL-HuffPo content. But he lost me here:
And let’s not forget that HuffPo gets journalism. I remember a few years ago when Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, goaded Arianna in a talk before his staff about why she’d possibly want such as them: reporters who cost a lot and are pains to work with. Because their stories get more traffic, Arianna replied. She understands the value of reporting.
No, Huffington understands the value of free labor, as Tim Rutten at the LA Times notes:
The bulk of the site’s content is provided by commentators, who work for nothing other than the opportunity to champion causes or ideas to which they’re devoted. Most of the rest of the content is “aggregated” “” which is to say stolen “” from the newspapers and television networks that pay journalists to gather and edit the news.
So let’s not pretend that much actual reporting is being produced (or truly valued) by the Huffington Post. What is indisputable, as Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy points out (and echoed by some commenters at Jarvis’ thread) is that Huffpo produces
nearly daily dangerous antivax and alt-med stuff.
For this reason, Orac, in his own take-no-prisoners style, is contemptuous of the deal (“AOL is buying that wretched hive of scum and quackery”) and also wonders if the new mainstream platform portends that Arianna Huffington will soon
become the Oprah Winfrey of the “new media.”
He didn’t mean that as a compliment.
Yes, HuffPo is wretched for a number of reasons. I hope that someone, somewhere can convince AOL and or Huffington that it’s not in anyone’s best interests overall to continue to propagate anti-vaxx denialism and the rest of the dangerous alt-med BS infesting the site now.
Just to expand on this a bit, which I’ll get around to in a post, eventually: I have a similar issue with Grist as well, if they’re not paying all those guest contributors (I have no idea what their economic model is, but I’m guessing it’s similar to HuffPo, where Grist editors curate (and assign/solicit) free content for their site. I liked it better when they were doing straight journalism (which included a blog), but they’ve morphed into a green version of the Huffington Post.
Keith – Jeff Jarvis is an asshat. Read Ron Rosenbaum’s pieces on him in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2204372/) and then ignore him forever. You’re on the money re HuffPo; they’re not practicing journalism, they’re playing at journalism. And Arianna is laughing all the way to the bank.
Arianna is so ridiculous a figure, it’s a wonder she hasn’t been elected to Congress.
Bruce, my thoughts on Jarvis are conflicted. For example, I have been critical of him before (even linking to that Slate piece you mentioned) in this post.
I definitely don’t accept his perspective uncritically. As for Arianna laughing all the way to the bank, right you are, and as for all those liberals worried about losing a high traffic platform, Dana Milbank has an interesting, related take on her political shapeshifting,