Nov 30th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Is Arianna going to huff and puff and blow the traditional media down? According to the New York Times (reg. required), the Huffington Post blog network is getting into the journalism business in a big way. The site only started 18 months ago but has become a serious online player, with 2.3 million unique visitors a month — more than some mainstream newspaper websites.
Huffington says it has hired Melinda Henneberger, a former New York Times reporter and Newsweek staffer, as its political editor, and plans to hire “a number” of other journalists to help it produce online journalism “with attitude.” The Post is already doing something along those lines with its Eat The Press feature, whose editor Rachel Sklar is a Canadian transplant.
This is obviously what Huffington has planned for the $5-million in financing the site got from Softbank Capital earlier this year (it also has funding from Greycroft Partners, backers of Rafat Ali’s online media shop, PaidContent). Arianna said she will be hiring investigative journalists and reporters with video expertise. They will travel, have deadlines and (gasp!) get paid, just like “real” journalists.
Coincidentally, there’s been a lot of talk over the past few days about Kevin Maney’s recent piece for USA Today about what to do with newspapers — which my friend and former journalist Mark Evans discusses here. In my view, newspapers had better get their running shoes on, because online media like Huffington Post and PaidContent are already halfway down the track.
Update:
As Jeff Jarvis notes, this announcement comes just over a week after two senior journalists left the Washington Post to join an online media startup that plans to focus on multi-platform political reporting.
Nov 29th, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
Over at the Online Journalism Review (published by USC Annenberg), Sandeep Junnarkar has an interview with Calvin Tang, the co-founder of social-news site Newsvine, which launched in March:
There were the three major things that we are going after. First, our aim was to set out to automate the collection, organization, and syndication of the exponentially growing pool of content available on the Web. With the rise of the blogosphere and personal publishing, it seems that there is becoming an ever-increasing amount of content out there.
The second thing we set out to do was to leverage the base of people in the world who had a story to tell but who also lacked an easy way to use publishing platforms and get an audience. Not everybody in the world is tech-savvy enough to set up his or her own blog. That’s why the first wave of citizen-generated content out there was very tech-heavy.
Our third aim was to give people a way to interact with each other in meaningful ways on topics of shared interest and to also be able to discover new material and authors as a result of this interaction.
Nov 29th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Online mogul Barry Diller has his hand in lots of pies through InterActive Corp., including online dating (Match.com), event marketing (Ticketmaster) and travel (Hotels.com). Now, he reportedly has his eye on the media business, according to this article from Reuters.
Diller said he sees “opportunities as news increasingly moves to the Internet from newspapers,” and hinted that his company is close to announcing a new product. He also said that IAC wasn’t interested in buying a U.S. newspaper publisher or individual newspaper, which will no doubt come as depressing news to some publishers. He also said:
I actually think that there’s going to be real opportunity in the conversion of print journalism to online, real opportunity, which I think very few people have attacked head on. We’re doing it in our way from an original product creation at this point. I can’t really talk about what we’re doing because we’re, I think, fairly close to announcing it.
Hat tip to my friend Stowe Boyd for the link.
Nov 29th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The website “Tricks of the Trade” was set up by writer Matthew Baldwin after he wrote an article for The Morning News about the various inside tips that experts in various fields know. In one of the entries, Matt himself divulges some of the reasons why doing interviews with reporters by email is better than doing them by phone:
1. It is more likely that longer excerpts, or more excerpts, will be used in the story, because (a) the reporter will have to think longer about the questions he will ask and where he is trying to get, because the questions will have to be written down, and in a reasonably logical order; (b) it is easier to copy and paste whole intelligible sentences than listen to a tape and type the conversation and then turn confusing and long-winded arguments into intelligible short sentences;
2. It is less likely that your words will be distorted intentionally or unintentionally by the reporter (for the reasons mentioned in 1b). And if they are intentionally distorted you have proof of what you said and of the context in which you said it (the reporter knows this, so this will also make him/her more careful when writing the story);
3. You will sound more intelligent (unless you are a really bad writer) because you will “speak” in intelligent sentences and will have more time to think about the answers. You will also be able to understand where the reporter is trying to get, so you will waste less of your time saying things that will not make it to the story;
4. For all the above reasons (and especially for the time-saving factor), the reporter will be grateful to you and treat what you said with more sympathy and interview you more often and just maybe have time for dinner once!
Of course, there is a downside: If you are unlucky, someone like billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban might just post all of your emails and his responses on his blog, which he has done more than once.
Nov 28th, 2006 | Social Media | 4 Comments
Oprah, the billionaire “queen of all media,” reached out to the Internet for help with a recent show — or to stir up some publicity for a recent show, depending on how you look at it. She posted a question to Yahoo Answers, which is a kind of “wisdom of the crowds” site in which people ask questions and then others answer, and anyone can vote on which answers they like the best. The question was “What would you do with $1,000 to change the life of a perfect stranger?”
Here’s the intro that someone at the Oprah show wrote:
You may have heard about the concept of paying it forward — the idea of doing something meaningful to help someone else without asking for anything in return. So, if you were given $1,000 with the understanding that it had to be used to help others, how would you use the money and why? To see how others turned these endless possibilities into amazing results, watch Monday’s “Oprah.”
Just a cynical attempt at boosting ratings for a show, right? Except that Oprah’s question got more than 31,000 responses in just a few days, some of which were heartbreakingly personal. The number one response according to readers? “Give it to Christian Blind Mission International… for example, $33 will heal a father or mother of blindness from cataracts. $200 will do the same for a child.” Some details from the actual show are here.
Oprah’s question got the most responses Yahoo Answers has ever gotten on a question, beating the previous record set by another celebrity: Dr. Stephen Hawking — the author of “A Brief History of Time” and the man who holds the Lucasian chair in Mathematics at Cambridge, once held by Sir Isaac Newton — who asked how the human race could survive the next 100 years. He got about 25,000 responses.
