Journalism Futures 6

How many journalists work at the Huffington Post?

One of the more difficult answers to pin down!

The Huffington post US, in its list of staff, claims to have between 60 and 100 editors, many of them editing specialised content on various parts of the website; business, celebrity, culture etc. These also include those who are employed to work on the regional editions, such as Miami, LA, Detroit among others. With regard to reporters however, there are 47 present on the staffing register, all specialising in a specific area, with nearly half of them (21) employed to write on their politics team.

In contrast, The Huffington Post UK shows to have zero reporters working in house, with 18 editors and assistant editors making up their total staff numbers.

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Does The Huffington Post facilitate audience feedback? How?

Far from merely allowing its readers to give feedback, a large part of The Huffington Posts' content comes from its audience participation and comments. James Smith, chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post, describes the publication as a 'social news site' or a 'social media site with news attached'. This 'bottom-up'    strategy seems to be a key part of the Posts' success.

The Post claims to receive over 1 million comments every month and actively facilitates user involvement and feedback. Its blogging/content aggregation business model relies, in part, on user feedback. This allows its editors to determine, in real time, which stories are proving to be popular and should be pushed and visa-versa. This as well as other forms of metrics, allows the site to taylor its content in alignment with audience sentiment.

In another quote form James Smith, her urges us not to think of The Huffington Post as a news site that welcomes audience participation, but rather, 'a social media site where news is the topic'.

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What is the collective audience of the Huffington Post and how does being online affect this?

According to statistics provided by Quantcast (all figures accurate as of May 2011) The Huffington Posts' readers are overwhelmingly American, overwhelmingly white and are generally made up of mid-to-high earners, with 49% earning over 30k per year and 36% in the 100k+ wage bracket.

It is fair to say that the publication seems to attract young professionals of both sexes, with men and women spread more or less evenly at 53% and 47% respectively. Only 19% of its readers are parents and only 31% are not educated to a college level or higher.

As noted above its readership is predominantly white with 86% of its 6.1million global audience being classified as caucasian. Outside of the USA, Canada hosts the second largest readership with Great Britain, australia and India providing the rest.

The way The Huffington Post combines news, opinion and aggregated content appears to appeal to those with an interest in a variety of news content and ease of navigation, allowing particular focus on business and sports. This is backed by figures showing other sites Huffington Post readers visit, including NBCSports.com, Sportsnetwork.com, Wonkette and Democracynow.org.

So what do these figures tell us about The Huffington Post as an exclusively online publication?

We could argue that many office based professionals would prefer to gather their news whilst at their computers or on the move, using Smartphones and other such devises. This kind of approach would suite the Posts' layout and model as 'Dailyme' style news can be got at with ease using the subject drop down menus as apposed to traditional newspaper layouts.

However, although over a quarter of global and American audiences access The Post from their place of work, the other 75% (approx) are reading from home, suggesting that not only does it fulfil the important, hard news, needs of its readers but the entertainment and lifestyle content is also popular with websites such as Rolling Stone, TMZ and The Superficial also showing to be popular among readers.

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Does The Huffington Post have a local dimension? Where else does it operate?

The Huffington Post seems to be creating its own rules in terms of growth, whilst many other news outlets and providers struggle to deal with the decline in traditional means of news consumption and appear uneasy due to more and more news consumers looking online for their information.

The Huffington Post is embracing this new, mixed economy, journalism on local, national and internationl levels.

From its original incarnation, The national American version in 2005, it has evolved not only internationally, but locally as well. In 2008 the HuffPost Chicago first appeared, followed a year later by the HuffPost New York, HuffPost Denver and the HuffPost Los Angeles in 2009.

Whilst this expansion across the United States was underway, in 2011 the company took their publication international, with the HuffPost Canada and the HuffPostUK in the May and the July respectively.

Not content with this however, there are further plans. Later this year we will see the Posts first non-english-language edition, Le Huffington Post, and further still, there may be more European editions being considered for Spain, Germany and Turkey as well as further afield for Japan.  

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Who owns the Huffington Post?

Eight months ago, in February 2011, The Huffington Post was bought by the media group AOL for a fee of $315 Million Dollars.

As part of the merger, the original co-founder of the Post, Arianna Huffington, was appointed president and editor-in-chief of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group. This new media group incorporates a number of additional, AOL owned, subsidiaries that include but are not limited to, Patch Media, AOL Music and Engadget.

According to an article by The Huffington Post on, 'The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age - leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms'. Its goes on by saying, 'The combination of AOL's infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post's pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement'.

So, what are the implications?

Firstly, there may be some concern over this kind of merger and its effects of journalism as a paid profession. The tightening of ownership and control will inevitably result in the loss of jobs, AOL reportedly jettisoned a number of its other websites in preparation for the Huffington deal, which as we know, pays only a select number of writers, whilst the remainder of its content is either aggregated or acquired, free of charge, from the blogging community.  

Secondly, and perhaps more ominous, is the degree of control that will be handed to the newly appointed president with regard to the AOL homepage. A point raised in a web-article, written by Tommy Christopher, 'Arianna Huffington will now control the AOL Welcome Screen, the portal that drives millions of AOL users to network content every day'. Therefore, the potential to send traffic to the Huffington website for content that could be sourced from one of its competitors, is all too real.

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The Huffington Post

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.

Remember that you're not doing it for the money.