Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post.
Jokes her great grandmother says never bet on a company that takes itself out of Google.
Desperate times lead to desperate metaphors. .. and revenue modelos … and require better journalism than we’ve had.
Her view is hybrid media would be best of online media with transparency and speed with old media of journalism investigations.
But now those in new media under attack, that it is an “either or” game by some in old media by pointing fingers and calling names. When all else fails, reach for the nearest insult.
Parasites. Content kleptomanics. Tapeworks. Vampires, Thieves. All ways Murdoch and team have called aggregators.
If your customers were leaving in droves you’d try to figure out how to get them back. But instead, newspapers point fingers.
Reminds you can shut down Google right now by clicking disallow in your robots.txt file. You don’t really click, but you get the point.
Why haven’t they? Because they deny ability for aggregators and others to find you and link to your original source.
Having Glenn Beck not searchable on Google is a really good thing … but a good business move, not so much.
Information isn’t beer as someone tried to use as a metaphor in argument with her, and if you use the wrong metaphor, you get to the wrong business model.
Murdoch confuses aggregation with theft. HuffPo links to WSJ every day, never got a complaint. If it was wrong, they’d have heard about it.
Nothing about aggregation that’s not inconsistent with original content. HuffPo links out and also aggregates. Aggregation is part of the web’s DNA period.
And Murdoch plays both sides. They aggregates to as Techdirt pointed out recently (see A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That ‘Steal’ Content). AllThingsD voices, IGN has variety of web properties like Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator site.
Said she could only roll her eyes at the idea that Google promotes promiscuity. That’s a great thing for news, she says. This is a golden age for news consumers that can surf and get much and comment. Value of info at finger tips beyond dispute.
Time for media companies to stop whining about days when they had fat profits and not modernizing and pleasing readers. “They were asleep at the wheel. Missed the writing on the wall” …. and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruption the Internet create “and now they want to call a time out. a do over.”
Papers are down 7 million in circulation while up 30 million in online. Lots more stats about online growing.
We’re not in Kansas any more Toto. Some things are better and some things are worse, especially in painful loss of jobs. But it’s a brave new world and no reason to live in digital denial. There will be some roadkill … but only those who insist on merging into traffic in a horse and buggy.
That talk about Bing and Murdoch and no Google. Not gonna happen. First paywalls, then micropayments, the per article purchases, then daypasses. Things change like Lindsey Lohan changes meds she says. [But she’s also too harsh. Some of these things do have a place and may help.]
Talking about Steven Brill’s plans and various payment models that she thinks basically are crazy. She says people will only pay for financial content and weird porn.
Free content is not without problems, but it’s here to stay and publishers need to figure it out — and many people are. TechDirt does it. ProPublic does not profit mode. HuffPo has multiple models.
We can’t use an analog map to find our way in a digital world.
Two biggest stories were missed: lead up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown. Don’t tell me that’s the kind of journalism you want to preserve. We’ve had far too many autopsy and not enough biopsies. That’s where online media, because they’ll stay on a story until something happens, have a huge contribution to make. We’ve only begun to see the beginnings of that.
She takes about six papers including the WSJ and thinks they’ll be here indefinitely. But question isn’t future of newspapers but the future of journalism. And it’s to be found with the growing number of people who find new in a new way. Who don’t passively take it. In short, news has become social and will become more community powered, collaboratively produced.
NY Times three days after all the tweets etc, quoted political analysts saying what people had already seen for themselves. But NYT also had an aggregator service. I’m not saying it will be either or. We need great reporters on the scene, but we also need the citizen journalists around the world, thousands of them.
Final point, bloggers and citizen journalists that aren’t paid are constantly mocked. But old media doesn’t get people are off the couches, interacting. Same people who never questioned why consumers would sit on a couch for eight hours would find it rewarding to weigh in on issues even if it’s not the way to make their living. They don’t understand why anyone tweets or blogs or do wikipedia or whatever for free. They need to understand that if they’re to understand the future of journalism.
HuffPo has dozens of reporters on payroll and will expand that and citizen journalists. But value of editors as curators will become even more important to keep everyone from being swept ways.
Sooner put away metaphors, more we can get to journalism that will thrive and survive.
UPDATE: Arianna Huffington has posted the transcript of her speech.
