The Huffington Post-AOL Deal

makes perfect sense, and in the abstract follows exactly the same strategy as the Murdoch-Apple deal behind The Daily. (And note how the HuffPost news quickly overwhelmed what little attention The Daily had generated.) Both are alliances of a news operation with a holder of a digital bottleneck. Of the two, I think the HuffPost-AOL deal is more likely to work, but that is a hunch based purely on the amount of fun involved in reading the two products. Granted, NewsCorp has a nice brand in newspapers and opinion, but it's still antique--it smells like the viewership of Fox News. Huffington may be a charlatan, but she knows how to keep it fresh.

The Newsosaur, who is always worth reading, thinks the deal is another example of the valuation of aggregated content at the expense of content creation. He compares FaceBook's market cap with McClatchy's to underscore this point. His argument underscores the fact that the new media bottlenecks don't really have an economic incentive to be content creators. And this is obviously true for FaceBook. It is less obviously true for the social networking sites in 2nd thru 10th place, or for the search engines that want to challenge Google.

Network television news is one of the great legacy media now under considerable strain. But television networks (and radio before them) were not drawn to enterprise reporting out of economic motivations. They were drawn to news as a public service in the full knowledge that the public stood ready to have the state regulate their content and scrutinize their license to monopolize a frequency. Broadcast news was a loss leader, at least on the national level. It is a bit utopian to think that the Googles and the Microsofts of the world can invest in news operations without some inducement external to the market. Perhaps a quick visit to the tax code might give some incentive? Internet businesses are still wildly undertaxed.... In the meantime, there's only the value of news in drawing traffic. AOL is making a gamble, but not a bad one.

HuffPost is more than an aggregator. In fact, it is one of the first sites on the web to actually project the kind of voice that newspapers project while offering a good range of original material. I'm not a daily reader, but could imagine being one. And I do know a couple of people who occasionally write for it. They don't feel exploited. (Of course, it's not their day job.)

HuffPost is not the destination for news on the web. It is located at the kind of place where news on the web will eventually wind up.

The Daily Debuts

but it will be a long time before I actually see it. That doesn't mean I won't comment, though.
The newspaper industry seems to be rooting for this one. Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is charging something like a buck a week for a subscription to this IPad only product, becoming the first to seize the do-over that the tablet computer moment seems to be granting to news organizations. All of em blew the first chance to get the digital age right.
Murdoch et al. have gotten one element right this time. They have colluded with the company that controls a key bottleneck. According to an anonymous source quoted in today's NYTimes,

The News Corporation agreed last year to make Fox programs available on Apple TV for 99 cents, making it the only network other than ABC to do so. Apple in turn agreed to throw its considerable muscle behind The Daily, this person said. Mr. Jobs said he would appear at the debut event alongside Mr. Murdoch, but Mr. Jobs was absent, having recently taken a medical leave from Apple.

Sounds like a handshake deal among robber barons, or titans of industry, or some other nineteenth-century set of personages. Leave the personages aside, though, and the industrial logic is clear. In the age of the newspaper, economies of scale in print technology and urban advertising let dailies become monopolies and then control the flow of every sort of intelligence: financial information, classified advertising, political reporting, sports news. In the digital media environment, economies of scale have created similar concentrations of power at other points: the browser, the operating system, the I-whatever. If a news organization is going to make money in digital land, it will have to partner with Google or Microsoft or Apple. That's simple math.

But Apple and Rupert? That's non-Euclidian geometry. You just can't picture it. The more I try, the more I root against it.