Comments on: Huffington Post-ization of the Media

By: charles austin

charles austin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:43:15 +0000

I think this is confusing the medium with the message, with, of course, apologies to Marshall McLuhan. The Huffington Post and the overwhelming majority of bloggers offer opinion, not news. The Seattle PI switching to an online format would not make them at all like the Huffington Post, if they still predominantly published news, i.e., did journalism. Alas, news lost out to opinion in newspapers and aggregators (or outsourcers) like the AP long ago.

By: Bithead

Bithead — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:20:31 +0000

If there's one thing that the Huff-Po shows us, though, it's that shaorter and yes sometimes snarky articles, tend to rely more on the manipulation of the reader's emotions, than they rely on the facts of the case. In a world where so much of the politics of the day is centered on emotional, and not logical responses...(Ex; "Obama will pay my rent") it's easy to see what they're after, here. And Dave, the difference is, that at least putting the article up on age four, gives one the direct exposure to whatever investigative reporting is contained in that article. With a link that lessens somewhat. I suggest that to some degree, this is the result of the success of blogs such as Reynolds, and Drudge, who get far more in the way of readership than does PI or any newspaper based site. I'd be interested to see what if any changes are made to the newspaper itself, however. At some point, someone's actually gotta do some investigation and writing.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:28:46 +0000

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. In a hypertext world there's not much difference between linking to something and putting the text of an AP article on page 4.

By: James Joyner

James Joyner — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:20:46 +0000

I don't consider wire services to be aggregators but rather outsourcing. They do original reporting and achieve economies of scale by wide syndication. That's a different animal than simply providing links to various blog posts and other papers.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:06:52 +0000

It ain’t, however, journalism.

If it ain't, then 90% of what most newspapers have been doing over the period of the last half century hasn't been journalism, either. Anybody ever heard of the Associated Press?