If the Huffington Post is the future of journalism, I don’t believe in the future. There’s no news-oriented Web site with a higher public profile, and possibly none more entertaining to visit (if you’re a Democrat), but HuffPo doesn’t pay contributors a dime and it aggregates (some would say poaches) tons of content from media that do. That’s “not our financial model,” Ken Lerer, a HuffPo founder, once said about the old-fashioned idea of paying the people who do the work. “We offer them visibility, promotion, and distribution with a great company.”
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Web sites—including the Reader’s—routinely aggregate articles from other sources, offering the best work of reporters who may soon be laid off by newspapers that before long may not exist. What sets HuffPo apart is its horde of bloggers lured by its vaunted visibility. In the long run, visibility alone butters less bread than visibility plus a little cash, which is why I’m far from the first person to question Huffington’s battle plan. But in the short run HuffPo is riding high. My friend Carol Felsenthal was telling me the other day that her husband, Steve, “loves the Huffington stuff—he’s always on the site. He just finds something fun about it.”
The relationship began with Clinton in Exile. Two months before it came out Felsenthal told HarperCollins, her publishers, that she wanted to start a blog to drum up interest in the book. “I was naive about the process,” she says. Start a blog, a marketer replied, and no one will ever see it. Instead, the marketer sent her to HuffPo. Her first post, dated March 17, examined Bill Clinton’s “pangs of envy” at Barack Obama’s acclaim as a speaker and memoirist; she was off and running. She says, “It just surprised me how effective it was, and how addictive it became to me because it’s immediate. Everything else—magazine or book writing—there’s such a lead time. But this—put something out at 4 PM and go out with the dog, and you have e-mail on your Blackberry saying your piece has been posted.”
When Felsenthal finishes a HuffPo item she files it in the system and e-mails the editors, who post it. That can happen right away, but she’s waited as long as two days, and that’s not a pleasant experience—speed is so central to blogging that waiting even a few hours for your story to show up online is like waiting inside a burning building for the fire trucks. Whenever her story is primarily local she files through Ben Goldberger, the editor of HuffPo’s recently launched Chicago edition, and lets him pass the story on to the national editors. “Not that there’s anything wrong with them,” she says, “but they’re kids. And they tend to make you feel like you’re some kind of overeager, overly ambitious person when I might have spent two hours on something and I want to make sure it’s up there and featured and it stays up long enough.”
“We’re doing our part,” she says. “We’ll be launching a fund for investigative journalists—we’ll put a fund aside so journalists can send us ideas about what to investigate and they will be paid for them. And we’re expanding our citizen journalism project that we launched during the campaign. Twelve thousand [unpaid] contributors—teachers, judges, college students who want to express what they’re seeing. So that’s the platform we provide—especially if you’re young and starting out. We tell them it’s another way to get your work out there and get known, instead of submitting articles for years before you get published.”
