Chautauqua, Day 3: Arianna Huffington

In an IM ear­lier this morn­ing, I told my friend Curt that I would be head­ing into the Chau­tauqua lec­ture by Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton. He said, “Heh… make sure you slap her for me.“

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huff­in­g­ton with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are cor­rect. I’m just not sure which two.

Obvi­ously, she was here to con­tribute to the dis­cus­sion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bash­ing. To be sure, there’s been a boat­load of each. But while the other folks in the dis­cus­sion were from inside the fold, work­ing in tra­di­tional media news­rooms and des­per­ately try­ing to wrap their arms around this non-traditional what­not, Huff­in­g­ton is com­ing at it from a dif­fer­ent angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she con­tends hers is one of the high­est traf­ficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a can­dle to the other rep­re­sen­ta­tives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rank­ings com­par­ing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bot­tom).





I’ve always had trou­ble with the fact that her site is not much more than linkbait — lim­ited orig­i­nal edi­to­r­ial con­tent sand­wich­ing link after link to tra­di­tional media out­lets. But if what she says comes to pass, the Huff­in­g­ton Post might just become a sig­nif­i­cant player in the media land­scape.

While those in the main­stream media (“MSM” as she calls them), are work­ing dili­gently to drive more of their con­tent to some level of engage­ment online, she’s talk­ing about open­ing brinck and mor­tar news bureaus of blog­gers and other cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists and researchers all dri­ving to sup­port the huffingtonpost.com so-called news machine.

This would be an inter­est­ing con­ver­gence of one mas­sive groundswell of dis­or­ga­nized force crash­ing again a weath­ered and heav­ily beaten shore. But it just may go to sup­port her cen­tral the­sis: all media will sur­vive. Print is not on it’s last breath, nor is broad­cast. Nor is integrity or edi­to­r­ial ethic. We’re just all work­ing to fig­ure out new ways to use them.

Tra­di­tional media isn’t help­ing itself in this tran­si­tion, how­ever. She pounded on the state of the indus­try with the build-up to the war in Iraq, remind­ing the audi­ence of known-erroneous infor­ma­tion pub­lished in guise of fact turned jour­nal­ists into “stenog­ra­phers to power to a very large extent.“

If the coun­try can’t trust tra­di­tional media to give us the straight dope on such things, we’ll turn to whomever steps up to the mic (nod to Michael J. Fox in that movie where he was Cheif of Staff to Michael Dou­glas for allow­ing me to ape that line poorly).

And it’s Huffington’s turn at the mic, to be sure.

Her talk was all about blogs, the blo­gos­phere, tech­nol­ogy, new media, and so on. Which made it all the more ironic that the first ques­tion in the Q&A was, “For those of us … who are Internet-impaired, would you define the term ‘blog’ and ‘blog­ger,’ and tell us what the dif­fer­ence in a blog and a web­site?“

Good ques­tion. There went the last hour.

Still, this is a woman who knows some­thing about man­ag­ing one’s rep­u­ta­tion online. She con­verted from Repub­li­can to Demo­c­rat ten years ago and weath­ered a stream of slings and arrows aimed squarely at her.

I write in the book, I have a whole chap­ter, on how hard it is to change your mind in pub­lic. Because what hap­pens is your friends really don’t what to have any­thing to do with you because they feel aban­doned, and the peo­ple in whose direc­tion you are going don’t trust you.

Huff­in­g­ton is car­ry­ing an impor­tant torch for those of us who’ve cho­sen to be online, and this audi­ence is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the world pop­u­la­tion who don’t under­stand the online ecosys­tem, don’t rec­og­nize the impor­tance of blogs to news­gath­er­ing and pub­lic com­men­tary, and they don’t know where to begin to find the good ones. That this firey Greek is help­ing dead-tree con­sumers to find new out­lets, then she’s doing her job right.