Superman 2012
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 by Ted Rall
What if the Man of Steel worked in the brave new era of post-print journalism?
Archive for the 'Huffington Post' Category
HuffPo “vision” a bit blurry
Sunday, April 10th, 2011 by Matt BorsI received this email from Mario Ruiz, attack dog for HuffPo, after my last blog post turned up on his Google Alert.
Matt, can I ask you to pls correct your item about Patricia Chui being fired.
She was never asked to solicit freelancers to blog for free — its now how our group blog works — and it’s part of the reason she was let go. The decision was made by the Editorial Director for Entertainment, Culture, and Lifestyle, John Montorio, who believes it’s imperative that all Huffington Post Media Group editors are on the same page when it comes to our vision of building a great team of full-time editors, writers, and reporters – who are all clear that this vision doesn’t include asking freelance writers to become unpaid bloggers, something we have never done and will never do. He also wanted to underline our belief in the Chinese wall between editorial and sales. Our shift from a freelancer model is simply a move toward continuing to build a great in-house edit team. It’s not a diminution whatsoever in the amount being spent on editors and writers. In fact, since the merger, we’ve announced dozens of new hires, and we’re going to be bringing on another 70-80 full time editors and reporters.
Thank you,
Mario
My emphasis. Perhaps Patricia Chui was wrong about telling the freelancers they would be asked to blog for free. Mario says that’s not their policy. But they must define “freelance writers” very narrowly, only including people who they have already decided to pay because they certainly do ask freelancers to contribute original work for free. I received this email from The Huffington Post’s Associate Blog Editor on August 11, 2010, a day before I entered Afghanistan.
Hi Ted and Matt –
I read about your fascinating adventures planned for Afghanistan and was wondering if either of you would have interest in posting or cross posting your work as a blog on the Huffington Post. We’d give it very prominent placement and would be happy to link back to your websites, etc. Let me know what you think — I think our readers would be very into the work you all are doing there.
Best,
Lila
I responded saying that I appreciated the interest and only work for money. She confirmed there would be no pay, only the “link back to your websites, etc.”
Sadly, we don’t have money in the budget for paying our bloggers.
Of course, there is money in the budget for that–they have made a conscious decision not to allot it to blogging. I make my living as a freelancer. Media outlets, especially ones that make millions, must pay me to add content to their publications. I don’t have other sources of income. The Huffington Post asked me to do free work for them to profit on. If that policy has changed since last August, then I’m happy for all their bloggers and glad Mario and the gang made it part of their “vision.” Sadly, I doubt that is the case.
See my recent cartoon on The AOL/HuffPo merger here.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Pirate This Book
Thursday, February 17th, 2011 by Ted RallBorders Goes Bankrupt. Will Books Survive?
Borders Books and Music, which once employed 30,000 workers at more than 600 stores, is bankrupt. Those numbers have been halved. And even after these massive cuts, analysts say, Borders is probably doomed.
The next time you walk past the empty ghost store where your local Borders used to be, you may ask yourself: Are we becoming a post-literate society?
Everywhere you look the printed word is under economic siege. Despite a 20 percent increase in demand in recent years, libraries are laying off, closing branches and reducing hours. Newsweek, one of the most venerable titles in magazine history, was recently sold for a buck (plus a promise to assume tens of millions in debt). Twitter is priced at $3.7 billion, nearly twice the public enterprise value of The New York Times ($2.03 billion).
The key word, of course, is the one in front of the word “word”: “printed.” We are reading more than ever. Just not in print.
According to a fascinating new study conducted by the University of Southern California, 94 percent of all data is now stored in digital form. (That ticked up a point as you were reading this.) Thanks to the Internet and various gadgets we read about 4.3 times more words each day than we did 25 years ago.
The more words we read, however, the less we want to pay the people who write them. The Times of London lost 90 percent of its online readership after it put its website behind a $4-a-week pay wall.
Why does this matter? Quality. The Huffington Post, recently sold to America Online for $315 million, points to a possible future in which the rewards go to ruthless aggregators who cater to Google common search phrases with slideshows about kittens and Lindsey Lohan. They rely on free blogs for most of their content. We’re getting exactly what they pay for: crap.
If you think journalism is bad now, it’s going to get even worse. The message is as loud and brassy as Arianna: real journalism doesn’t pay. Inevitably the best and brightest are gravitating to other fields.
Another unintended consequence of the digital revolution is lower memory retention. I recall significantly more of what I read in print than online; I’ve found the same to be true of my friends.
Norwegian researcher Anne Mangen told Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam about a paper she published in The Journal of Research in Reading. Mangen believes that we remember more of what we read in print than on a computer screen. This additional retention is due to variables that serve as unconscious memnonic devices: fonts, position of text, images, paper texture, etc.
“The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions—clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads— take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone,” argues Mangen. “Materiality matters…One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.”
My personal experience convinces me that there is a difference. On the Kindle, everything looks and feels the same. When I read the Times on newsprint, part of what helps me remember a story is the ad that ran next to it and the photo underneath. Sure, Kindle readers remember much of what they read. But not as much as old-fashioned bookworms.
It is hard to quantify the value of a country’s intellectual life. But as Americans read more and more, less of it printed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are losing something precious and irreplaceable.
So what’s the solution? European booksellers, publishers and newspapers receive generous government subsidies. Here in the U.S., where pseudo-free markets are a national religion, the feds bail out billionaire bankers, not bookstores.
In order to successfully compete with online sales and e-books, brick-and-mortar retailers will have to learn the lesson of Borders: middle of the road equals mediocre.
Beginning at least ten years ago Borders buyers began eschewing risks. Buying into the “blockbuster mentality” of stocking stacks of sure-thing bestsellers, they stocked fewer books by midlist authors—profitable, but not bestselling, titles. Browsers found fewer surprises at Borders. As for top-selling books, they’re cheaper at Costco and on Amazon.
Barnes and Noble has been struggling too, but their strategy seems to stand a better chance than Borders. B&N’s inventory is wide as well as deep. The fronts of their stores feel “curated,” the way good independent stores bring in customers with the promise of discovery and serendipity. If consumers want something obscure, odds are there’s a copy or two in the back, spine out.
It’s a frightening thought: America’s intellectual future may depend on the fate of a superstore.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
Waiting for Arianna
Friday, February 11th, 2011 by Ted Rall
Arianna Huffington sells her blog to AOL for $315 million. But what about the thousands of bloggers who made her rich by working for free?
