Founded by author and columnist Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post is driven by three sources of content. Aside from employing journalists to produce original news, it is also a content aggregator of news stories from a plethora of media outlets whilst at the same time offering a space for bloggers to voice their own impassioned opinions.
The initial American version first appeared in 2005 and was
followed by a number of other local versions before The Huffington Post UK and The Huffington Post Canada were launched in 2011.
Whether or not The Huffington Post’s business model is a
positive way to carry journalism into an online future is, it seems, subject to
much contention. Some might argue that this kind of ‘news’ marks the decline of
journalism, a view held by LA Times writer Tim Rutten, who says,
‘The media-saturated
environment in which we live has been called "the information age"
when, in fact, it's the data age. Information is data arranged in an
intelligible order. Journalism is information collected and analyzed in ways
people actually can use. Though AOL and the Huffington Post claim to have
staked their future on giving visitors to their sites online journalism, what
they actually provide is "content," which is what journalism becomes
when it's adulterated into a mere commodity’.
Alternatively, Jason
links, a political reporter at The Huffington Post thinks otherwise. In an
article entitled ‘How The Huffington Post Works’ he describes, perhaps with
some degree of bias and self-interest, how such a business model can work.
‘The original content that
drives the entire business and the aggregation that sends readers out into the
world of news and information -- helps to build an architecture that enables
thousands of other people to have a space to come and write and play and inform
and start conversations’.
It seems to me that both
arguments are not without some gravity and, I hope, will provide fuel for
future blog entries.
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