IN THE MEANTIME…..
….Be sure to read Tim Rutten’s very grumpy take on why the AOL-Huff Post merger is not helping journalism. (Actually he compares Arianna’s business model to “a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”
Here’s the column’s opening:
Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL’s $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it’s already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.
That’s a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers.
To understand why, it’s helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL’s last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Brentwood-based Arianna Huffington’s astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years…..
This was also pretty much the opinion of a number of people at the lively #pubmedialive! blogger get-together hosted by KCET and KPPC, where Arianna’s Come-Work-for-Me-for-Free model repeatedly entered the discussion.
Celeste,
FYI, the bill to extend the Patriot Act was voted down in the house.
Tim Rutten is spot on. “Content” created to generate “page views” is all that matters.
Btw, check out Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall has been expanding his pages with aggregated content, adding slideshows (a favorite tool of internet douchebags to generate page views), featuring news of the weird and upping his Sarah Palin content (something he’s recently had to defend to his readers, who have been complaining). He’s clearly setting the site up to sell.