Posts tagged huffington post

Huffington Post Wins Pulitzer

The Huffington Post’s David Wood won a Pulitzer for national reporting for a 10-part series called Beyond the Battlefield that explores the challenges Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans face after a decade of war.

HuffPo is the first online daily to win a Pulitzer.

Via Mashable:

The award may be Wood’s, but Huffington Post cofounder Arianna Huffington is a clear beneficiary. Over the past few years, Huffington has made a point of hiring experienced, well-known and (no doubt) expensive reporters like Wood.

The hirings are part of an effort to position the Huffington Post as a serious news organization — not, as former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has described it, as an “overaggregator” of “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications… [with] a left-wing soundtrack.”

The complete list of winners is available at Pulitzer.org.

AOL Prepping New Weekly iPad Magazine Called 'Huffington'

Via Forbes:

Huffington will be published weekly and will reflect the Huffington Post’s mix of original journalism and aggregated news, possibly with a small number of stories commissioned specifically for the magazine. Whether it will be a free or paid product hasn’t yet been determined. The Daily has shown that there’s a market for paid news apps; since its launch in early 2011, it has consistently been one of the top-grossing apps in the Apple store.

Whether readers would be willing to pay for a publication that’s mostly reheated content from a free website is a different matter, however. And then there’s the issue of charging for stories whose writers in many cases weren’t paid.

Noted, and probably good for HuffPo diehards, but I’m on the rather-view-a-news-org’s-site-than-app bandwagon. — Michael

AOL/HuffPo Double Down on Video

Via Digiday:

The video ad market is still heating up, but AOL is betting it will come to a boil very soon. It’s making a major bet with a new streaming service on Huffington Post that will launch in the summer and promises live content 12 hours a day, five days a week and hope to get up to 16 hours a day by 2013.

The service itself is ambitious, but even more so is the investment AOL is putting behind it: $30 million, according to an AOL source. HuffPo plans to create all the video itself. It will dedicate 100 employees to the operation. The scale of the effort would put it on track to be one of the largest producers of original for the Web video around.

Is Huffington Post Reinventing the Liveblog?

Via Simon Owens at Nieman Journalism Lab:

A few days ago, I clicked on a link to an Associated Press article published at the Huffington Post and reporting on a new AP poll that found widespread support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like hundreds of other news outlets, HuffPo subscribes to the AP and runs its articles to supplement the original content the AOL-owned company produces on its own.

A curious thing happened when I finished the article, however: I didn’t stop reading.

At the bottom of the piece, I came across a liveblog that published up-to-the minute news on the protests. The posts were a mixture of links, block quotes, reprinted tweets, and even small original news nuggets being reported by HuffPo journalists on the ground. All together, I probably spent an extra 20 minutes on the site than I would have otherwise. I began clicking around and found that HuffPo had embedded this same liveblog at the bottom of nearly every article concerning Occupy Wall Street.

Read through for the nuts and bolts of what HuffPo is doing, why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it.

Interesting is Nico Pitney, Executive Editor of the Huffington Post Media Group, observing how they identified three types of readers — the news browsers who just want the article overview, the junkies who want the immediate (liveblog) update, and the newsies who want both — and how they’re trying to satisfy each.

Huffington Post Recruiting Teens to Write for Free

Last Friday Forbes reported that AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group is launching HuffPost High School, a vertical aimed at the teen set.

The site will be edited by a paid 17-year-old but like much of the Huffington Post, content will be produced for free. In this case by unpaid teenage bloggers.

Running with the strategy, AOL will also solicit unpaid contributions from young teens and high schoolers for Patch, its network of 800 hyperlocal news sites.

“We’ll be expanding our sharing platform to teens,” an AOL spokeswoman explains to Forbes using the company’s social vernacular.  

Over at AdAge, Simon Dumenco is none too pleased:

Let’s get real here: AOL is not just another benign outlet for aspiring teen writers; it’s not the school newspaper writ large. It is, thanks to its combo with HuffPo, a massive, highly aggressive, cynically SEO’d page-view machine with a history of dubious ethics — and let’s not forget that AOL, despite all its troubles, still had second-quarter revenue of $542.2 million.

Back in February, AOL property TechCrunch reported that Patch “is churning out one piece of content every 9 seconds.” That’s what this is about, folks: churn. Page views. And getting unpaid children to help AOL shovel content — digital coal — into its page-view oven.

Quite simply, AOL/HuffPo intends to monetize the work of minors earning $0/hour. On Patch and HuffPost High School, it will sell ads against content created by minors — but it will not share advertising revenue with those minors.

Self-respecting advertisers have to ask if they really want to be a part of something like this.

Meanwhile, a $105 million class action lawsuit by former unpaid Huffington Post writers continues. So too a Newspaper Guild call for writers to boycott the publication.

HuffPo has long defended its practice of using unpaid contributors by arguing that consenting adults can share their labor in any way they please. True enough, but what happens when your writers aren’t old enough to legally consent?

Writes Jeff Berkovici:

Should teenagers who can’t legally vote, drink or have sex be allowed to decide for themselves what to publish in a place where it could potentially be read by millions of people? What if a 15-year-old wants to write confessionally about having an abortion, as this adult writer did, or joke about smoking marijuana, as this writer did? And what if that 15-year-old’s parent wants to have that posting deleted? And what if that parent is divorced, and his ex-spouse who shares custody gives her permission?

KQED public radio embraces the other guys, forging partnerships with HuffPo and hyperlocal sites

When Does Curation Become Suspendible Aggregation?

Despite its recent hiring spree, the Huffington Post’s bread and butter is content curation. Their rationale to those creating the original is that they’re driving traffic back to the source so it’s actually win-win all around.

Yesterday, Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco took exception to that, writing that what’s really going on is isn’t so much fair use as unethical aggregation. 

As an example, he looks at the traffic stats for an article he wrote that the HuffPo later picked up. End result, 57 new page views from people clicking through from the HuffPo piece to the Ad Age piece. By comparison, Techmeme drove over 750 page views.

Ender result: Hufffington Post suspends writer, apologizes for over-aggregated post.

In a letter from Peter S. Goodman, Executive Business Editor of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, to Dumenco, Goodman writes:

We have made a very substantial investment in original reporting here, bringing in dozens of new writers in recent months. And while we will continue to curate the news for our audience, what occurred in this instance is entirely unacceptable and collides directly with the values that are at work in our newsroom. We have zero tolerance for this sort of conduct. Given that, the writer of the offending post has been suspended indefinitely.

More broadly, your complaint has prompted us to redouble our efforts to make sure our reporters and editors understand that this sort of thing is unambiguously unacceptable.

You think?

Update: via SoupSoup, Dumenco Writes Back:

I have to say, though, that I’m disheartened by your decision to indefinitely suspend the writer who “over-aggregated” (in the words of Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute’s Romenesko blog) my post at AdAge.com. I’m certainly not alone in feeling this way. I imagine that, like me, you’ve been reading the reactions that have been rippling across the media blogosphere, and you’re finding that there’s general unanimity that HuffPo is singling out — indeed, scapegoating — a young writer for engaging in a style of aggregration long practiced, condoned and encouraged by Huffington Post editorial management.

Comscore confirmed that HuffingtonPost.com traffic for May has surpassed NYTimes.com traffic for first time -- 35.5MM vs. 33.59MM

Class Action Suit Against Huffington Post

Via the New York Times:

The Huffington Post is the target of a multimillion dollar lawsuit filed in United States District Court in New York on Tuesday on behalf of thousands of uncompensated bloggers.

The suit seeks at least $105 million in damages for more than 9,000 writers.

The case raises significant unsettled questions about the rights of writers in the digital age and, at the very least, promises to offer a palette of colorful characters on each side.