Huffington Post Purchased by AOL, Reinforces Importance of Content

In the era of digital media, people frequently say that "content counts," but the reality is often different from the rhetoric. Online news in many cases is repurposed content from print or other "old" media, and original online content is increasingly produced by unpaid and heavily opinionated writers.

So news people might well be heartened by the report today that AOL has purchased The Huffington Post for $315 million. Namesake and co-founder Arianna Huffington will remain as editor-in-chief of the site. The liberal blog-and-news service has grown quickly in popularity in recent years, adding more paid staff, localized editions, original content, and special sections. Its acquisition is the latest sign that AOL sees its future in quality content, not in providing access to the internet itself, which was its former reason for being. The company made headlines last year with the purchase of TechCrunch, and it has been steadily building out its network of "hyper-local" news sites, AOL Patch.

For some background: Huffington has made numerous appearances at The Commonwealth Club of California. Below is video of Arianna Huffington addressing the Club in 2008, when she discussed her take on American politics and the old/new media divide.


Here is audio from her 2003 appearance at The Club. She returned in 2004 to discuss that year's political campaigns; you can read a transcript of her 2004 speech and audience question-and-answer session. And, finally, she spoke to a sold-out Inforum crowd just this past November, when she and moderator Raj Patel talked about everything from the Huffington Post's news choices to The Daily Show's John Stewart; you can read an extended excerpt from that event in the digital edition of The Commonwealth magazine.

Hopeful Huffington?

By Sally Schilling

Arianna Huffington will speak to a sold-out audience at the Commonwealth Club on Thursday evening (check our web site, standing room tickets may still be available) about her new book, which has an off-putting yet increasingly relevant title: Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream.


A media innovator, Huffington is the co-founder of an extremely successful political blog which bears her name and which provides links to the political news of the moment. It boasts a large collection of liberal commentary on contemporary issues from noted scholars, actors, authors and political figures. “[The Huffington Post] has grown from a hyperspace operation with a cadre of volunteer journalists to a hefty organization with 6,000 unpaid bloggers and 186 paid staffers,” according to Forbes magazine.


In a recent blog post on her $100 million media blog, Huffington wrote that since writing her new book with a doomsday title, her outlook on the future of America is surprisingly optimistic. Huffington, the queen of the inventive online news medium, wrote that she finds hope for the future in the American citizens who are pulling together by creating their own media innovations, providing online forums for struggling Americans. Huffington cited wevegottimetohelp.org, a blog started in Portland, Oregon, which lists volunteer projects happening around the country and encourages people who are unemployed to put their skills to work to help others in need.


Huffington will speak at the Club Office at 6:30 p.m.

Frank Luntz Seeks to Frame Debate About Financial Re-Regulation

 

GOP pollster Frank Luntz speaks to The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco. November 6, 2009. Photo by John Zipperer.

Republican strategist Frank Luntz told a Commonwealth Club audience in November 2009 that Californian supporters of gay marriage had made a mistake by choosing the word marriage in their fight against the anti-gay-marriage referendum Proposition 8. "If you want to resolve this issue in a way that some of you want to resolve it, take out the word marriage," he explained. "If I were advising those on the Left who want equality in marriage as they define it, then don't say the word marriage, and you will get it, because the American people believe that marriage is between a man and a woman and that's what they think. But: They are hostile, openly hostile to discrimination."

Luntz, who makes his living dissecting what Americans tell him they believe and suggesting ways for political groups to get their message across to the public, said that the way an argument is framed can be all the difference in whether Americans accept it. "My issue with those on the far Right and those on the far Left is that, You don't want to win, you just want to shout, and you never get anything through as a result."

In other words, words matter.

Now, Luntz is weighing in on the efforts to re-regulate Wall Street, an effort championed by another recent Commonwealth Club speaker, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. But Luntz is advising folks who worry that the effort to impose more regulation on the financial services industry will hobble private business.

Over at Huffington Post, Sam Stein writes that Luntz has authored a memo telling opponents of reform to frame the reform effort as being chock-full of all those bad words that make Americans recoil: bank bailouts, lobbyists, loopholes, and bureaucracy. "Washington's incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support," Stein quotes Luntz's memo.

At the bottom of Stein's article is a window for reading the entire Luntz memo, so you can read it and make up your own mind if it will be useful in the policy debate.

Commonwealth Club members will be able to read an excerpt of Luntz's speech in the February/March issue of The Commonwealth magazine, out this week.

The Media and the Recession: Dr. Duffy Sparks HuffPo Debate

Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy touched off a spirited debate among Huffington Post readers with her recent article on that site, "Bad News Bears: Economic Fear Mongering by the Media." As of this morning, 60 responses had been posted to the article's comments section. In true Internet fashion, the comments range from hearty agreement to vociferous disagreement.

Read the post yourself and join the discussion!

Jerry Weissman Blogs on HuffPo: Commonwealth Club and Liddy Dole

Jerry Weissman, the founder of Power Presentations and author of In the Line of Fire and Presenting to Win, writes on the Huffington Post blog site today about his Tuesday night program at The Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley.

In his post, he talks about lessons learned from Sen. Elizabeth ("Liddy") Dole, and backs them up with a Dole story he learned at his Club event from Bill Peacock, a member of the Commonwealth Club's Silicon Valley Board of Advisors.

Read it here.

Phil Bronstein Talks Len Downie and Commonwealth Club on Huffington Post

Phil Bronstein, editor at large and vice president at The San Francisco Chronicle (and a long-time moderator of Commonwealth Club events) contributed a blog posting to the Huffington Post recently. In it, he discusses the challenges (sometimes amusing) of interviewing another journalistic pro.

Am I the only one who thought of the Ron Howard film "The Paper" when I read his comments about journalists stealing each others' notes? Bronstein begins his post with "Good journalists are trustworthy, but they don't trust anyone else."

Suskind Stands by Allegation of Administration Forgery

When it comes to adding infamy to the record of the Bush administration's misdeeds, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind has made it a cottage industry.

In his 2004 book, The Price of Loyalty, Suskind was the first to find evidence that the administration had the overthrow of Saddam Hussein on the brain starting with the first meeting of its National Security Council. Two years later, The One-Percent Doctrine, reported al-Qaeda's intention to attack New York's subway system and revealed Vice President Dick Cheney's belief that even a one-percent chance of a terror attack justified preparing for it as a certainty.

Suskind's newest book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, published late last year, contains the most explosive allegation of all: the forging of documents by the administration during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Read a short Q&A with Suskind about the book for Men's Journal.

Despite the initial burst of attention the story garnered in the media it had a short shelf life. While the allegation has not been refuted, the notion administration officials could not have been irresponsible enough to put their indiscretions in writing -- certainly not White House stationary -- colored the story with enough doubt to sweep it under the rug.

(Watch Suskind on Hardball with Chris Matthews -- this day without the screaming host -- talk about the handling of the forgery.)

In a posting on The Huffington Post, Suskind fought the requisite blowback the administration would unleash on him by standing by his on-the-record interviews and his book saying:

So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....

Nevertheless, the story has not gained much traction in the months since and likely will merely join the endless pantheon of serious acts of malfeasance attributed to the Bush administration.

Ron Suskind will discuss his latest book on the Bush administration and provide an outlook on the road ahead for President-elect Barack Obama tonight at The Commonwealth Club of California at 6 p.m.


--By Steven Tavares

Do you think Suskind's disclosures merit more attention? Why hasn't it gotten it? Or do you think Suskind's disclosures are without merit? Leave a comment and voice your opinion!

Dr. Gloria Duffy blogs on Huffington Post

Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy's recent posting on this blog about the nomination of Leon Panetta to be CIA director is getting an even wider audience. Today's Huffington Post includes the article by Dr. Duffy. You can read it here.

In Defense of Blogs; They're Not Taking Writer's Jobs

Will newspapers exist five years from now? Will bloggers overrun newsrooms? And what to do with legions of out-of-work career journalists unable to shift to the Brave New World of the Internet?

One of web journalism's pioneers, Michael Kinsley believes cyberspace is critically inundated with blogs, as he writes in his Dec. 1 article in Time.

Kinsley, who founded the web magazine Slate in 1996, would seem to be the one journalist able to see into the journalism's tangled future. Instead, like many long-time scribes, the ability to condemn blogging as a craft unlike any other form of writing seems easier than describing its possible benefits.

In a article for The Atlantic, long-time blogger Andrew Sullivan writes what may become the manifesto for the true meaning of blogging. In the current issue of the magazine, Sullivan describes blogging as an elusive middle ground between dialogue and writing. Because of the immediacy and unfiltered aspect of the blogging, he argues, a writer delivers crisp, unfiltered information.

Kinsley's article laments the sheer number of blogs that "need" to be read. Jason Linkins writing at The Huffington Post thinks this coming "blogopocalyse" is a bit of hyperbole with a simple solution.

I just don't recognize the human beings suffering from blog overload in the way Kinsley describes it, as creatures I have met in Real Life. Blog readers are not all mindless, passive drones on a Sarah Palin-esque quest to read "all of them." The simplest solution to the problem Kinsley cites, it seems to me, is for sentient beings, capable of making choices, to exist.

Beyond this, Kinsley veers back to a common dig at the bloggers perpetuated by print journalists. The key is to ridicule them as Kinsley wrote in a 2006 column for Time, asking, "So are we doomed to get our news from some acned 12-year-old in his parents' basement recycling rumors from the Internet echo chamber?"

One could argue that the underlying argument against the blog levied by journalists is buried beneath human nature – jealousy and spite – for the most part. In my own experience, I have two 25-year-vets of the San Francisco Chronicle as journalism lecturers. Both despise the activity and openly mock the craft. To them, being a reporter is about pounding the pavement and getting the story before the other guy. As Kinsley writes, "while an article a day used to be a typical reporter's quota (or in the leisurely precincts of newsmagazines, an article a week), reporters are now expected to blog 24/7 as well."

The bulk of the perception regarding the end of newspapers may actually be a related to the experience of professional journalists who pushed their way through J-school, worked the dreaded city council beat and forged a solid reputation for honesty, reporting and excellent writing and now see the younger generation have it way too easy.

Change is difficult no matter occupation you're in. The influx of computers in the office space during the 1980s surely made older employees nervous about doing jobs that once involved pencils, paper and giant accounting ledgers.

The other point of ridicule is to propagate the image of a slacker recycling the news, or as Kinsley said two years ago:

Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports.

Scott Rosenberg, one of the founder of the web 'zine, Salon, answers the question of blogging's legitimacy succinctly in an article for The Guardian last year. It is not about the ability of anyone on the planet to broadcast their thoughts and ideas according to the media, but what that power will do to their jobs.

Most journalists' understanding of the nature of blogging has been circumscribed by a focus on how it might affect our profession. We write articles about whether blogging can be journalism, we worry about whether bloggers can or will replace journalists, and we miss the real stories.

The real story is the democratization of thought that worries journalists who bash bloggers. The keys to the kingdom of information no longer sit in the locked offices of the publisher, but on simple, free blogging sites readily available on the web. In some ways the rise of blogs is similar to the decline of adult film studios and the availability of VCR's and video tape. Adult studios quickly ran out of business. Actors and actresses were no longer needed. Anybody could produce these videos and a glut of "entertainment" followed.

If you follow Kinsley's logic that every single blog must be read instead of making informed choices on the integrity and newsworthiness of each, then hordes of teenage boys would have never left their homes.

When it comes to the quality of blogging, it is compelling to think of John Milton's concept of the "marketplace of ideas." There are surely millions of worthless blogs, but like any good newspaper or book, the good one's can rise to the top, leaving the scum at the bottom of the cyberspace tank inconsequential and without significant page views.

"We're not going to run out of web space." writes Rosenberg, "and each of us still decides how to spend our time. What price is the world paying for the existence of blogging's universal soapbox? Unless someone has figured out how to make you read a blog when you don't want to, I don't see one."

The blog as most of us knows it is not the Wild West of writing that journalists will have you think, but a place well-known to the those same writers – The New York Times is of far greater gravitas than your free weekly tabloid dropped on your driveway in the same way The Huffington Post is of greater importance than the slacker posting in his underwear that Kinsley describes.

Unless you own stock in The New York Times Co., it is best not to lament the fall of newspapers. For every journalists out of work, a thousand citizen journalists will rise to take their place making society stronger with the power of truth and knowledge.

Michael Kinsley will be speaking Dec. 9 at The Commonwealth Club of California at 6 p.m. For tickets click here. Kinsley will give his thoughts on the current U.S. financial system and the politics involved.