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.
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.
posted by jnerone at 10:01 AM
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