Is HuffPo A Whipping Boy?
If memory serves, crappy paying news jobs, long unpaid internships, a lack of diversity among mainstream media hires, and news executives’ failures to embrace the web had nothing to do with HuffPo or AOL, quite. It seems like L.A. Times’ Tim Rutten is making HuffPo a bit of a whipping boy for the failures of the industry at large, even if he’s writing well…
Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL’s $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it’s already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.
That’s a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers.
To understand why, it’s helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL’s last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Brentwood-based Arianna Huffington’s astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years…
2 notes
-
citizenkerry likes this
-
andrewgraham reblogged this from futurejournalismproject and added:
Whipping boy? I dunno. The size of Huffington Post — both in its traffic and in the valuation Aol attributed to it — is...
-
myrealname submitted this to futurejournalismproject
