Bloggasm

Is the site preparing itself for life after the November election?

In a March New Yorker article meticulously detailing the depressing decline of the newspaper industry, Eric Alterman gave a nod to what he considered the newspaper of tomorrow. Skipping over choices like Slate and Salon, the journalist chose to spotlight a website that is still labeled a blog in Technorati’s Top 100: The Huffington Post.

“Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper,” Alterman wrote.

The fact that he had targeted a publication that paid the majority of its writers with nothing but “exposure” raised a number of eyebrows; after all, a laid-off journalist won’t find much comfort with the knowledge that he has been replaced by someone willing to work for free. At least when jobs get outsourced to India, somebody is still managing to get paid a few bucks an hour.

A few media critics also noted that The Huffington Post is most widely known as a political website. Within the last year it has managed to break two of the biggest campaign stories of the season — Obama’s “bitter” comments and Bill Clinton’s outraged remarks about a journalist — and recent reports have shown that its traffic has outpaced the once-unequaled Drudge Report, a site that is supposedly read religiously by every beltway journalist.

But within the last few months we’ve seen some signs that Arianna Huffington is aggressively trying to expand above and beyond politics, announcing her plan to create a new hyperlocal news site for the Chicago metro area. And this week, the publication saw the launch of a new “Style” section similar to the style tabs you’ll find in most major dailies.

The section will be edited by Anya Strzemien, a former Life Magazine editor who signed on to The Huffington Post in April 2007. I spoke to Strzemien on the phone today, and she confirmed that the new launch is an attempt to widen the publication’s coverage.

“I think politics will always be a focus of Huffington Post,” she said. “But yeah, we’re certainly trying to branch out to other areas as any newspaper would.”

The idea for the Style section came about two months ago — she said it wasn’t difficult to get Arianna to give it the green light — and Strzemien has been developing and networking with a list of contributors since then. I asked her what kind of content she planned on running.

“I think the idea is to be very bloggy, it’s going to be very opinionated,” she replied. “I don’t think the media needs yet another how-to-communicate-better-with-your-spouse story.”

Over the past few days since the launch, the section has run a story about McCain wearing $520 black leather Ferragamo loafers and a piece by George Stephanopoulos’s wife, Alexandra Wentworth, about style in Washington circles.

I asked what kind of publications she was trying to emulate or compete against.

“I definitely don’t want to think of us as competing with other publications,” Strzemien said. “But I think the style outlets that I respect a lot are Jezebel and the New York Times style section.”

Near the end of the interview I commented that I couldn’t help but notice that many of the stories the style section had run so far happened to be focused on politics. Was it possible that the section still managed to fit into the site’s overall political theme?

“I think it’ll be a mix,” she said. “Some of the stories will have a political angle, but not even 50% of them will. But yes, we’ll certainly be paying attention to what people wear during the election.”

By the time articles about the mortgage crisis began hitting the front pages of major newspapers, the story was already old. Reporters were left playing catch-up to the current meltdown and in the process even seasoned news junkies were left confused. With the inverted pyramid style of storytelling, most journalists had a difficult time summarizing a situation that had been years in the making. News consumers were left simply with a series of buzz words — subprime mortgage, adjustable rate mortgages, housing bubble — that painted an incredibly broad picture that the economy wasn’t doing so well.

But then Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life stepped in and explained it all. In a radio documentary titled “The Giant Pool of Money,” producer Alex Blumberg and NPR’s economics correspondent Adam Davidson teamed up to create what is perhaps the most comprehensive explanation of the meltdown to date.

The two went back and created a meticulous narrative of the events leading up to the burst, interviewing dozens of sources — consumers, bankers, investors, defaulters — to allow listeners to understand the Kafkaesque logic and domino effect and how it all tied back to this “giant pool of money.” When either Blumberg or Davidson would get too ahead of himself, the other would playfully ring him back in. No stone was left unturned.

After listening to the episode, many people claimed that they had a newfound understanding of what had gone wrong. They could piece together the incredibly complex triggers of the crisis and finally comprehend the news stories they were reading and hearing. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen was one of these people

In an article published at Media Shift’s Idea Lab, Rosen said that before listening to that episode he hadn’t been a “customer” for mortgage crisis stories, preferring to skip over them rather than consuming what he didn’t understand. After hearing it, he wrote, he had a “civic mastery” that turned him into an avid consumer of such stories.

I spoke to Rosen in a phone interview today, and he talked about how reporters should take this example to generate a new kind of storytelling — what he called “explainy journalism.”

“In many instances the stories themselves do not provide the key necessary to decode them,” he said. “You cannot find in the story itself the key you need to read it. And it’s usually the people writing the story who have no idea that the key is lacking, because they already have the information necessary to decode it.”

I asked Rosen how journalists could fix this problem, but he said he hadn’t yet figured out how to implement his theory. For now, he simply recognizes that the problem exists.

This American Life‘s Alex Blumberg sees this lack of context in news stories as well. I interviewed the producer earlier today, and he explained that his entire reason for creating the episode grew out of his frustration with how the media covered complicated stories.

“I feel like my constant problem with the daily news media is that either you’re always entering the story in the middle or often at the end,” he said. “And they don’t do a very good job of talking about the beginning and what got us to this point where it became news.”

The idea for the episode began culminating for him years before the bubble burst, when he read a presentation by an economist arguing that debt was rising without the necessary correlation of rising income. Eventually, he and NPR’s Adam Davidson began exchanging emails about the possibility of teaming up on a housing crisis story. Early this year the two pitched the episode to their bosses.

Blumberg said that the episode is the show’s most popular to date, beating out its nearest competitor by over 50,000 downloads. And the response has been overwhelming.

“We got more listener feedback for that show than just about any show we’ve put out,” he said. ” … It was overwhelmingly positive. People were saying things like, ‘I didn’t really understand this. It was in the news all the time but I didn’t know what they were talking about until I heard that episode.’ It was very gratifying because that’s exactly what my intent was. Because that was me; I didn’t understand it either. Fortunately I have a job where I get paid to go figure things out and report back. And that’s really what my goal was.”

I asked Blumberg whether he had seen any evidence that his story had not only affected the consumers of mortgage crisis news but also the reporters that wrote it. He responded that it was extremely difficult to tell, but he had lunch recently with a New York Times business reporter who said that many Times journalists had listened to and enjoyed the episode. He has also noticed some recent articles that seemed to give a slight nod to wording from “The Giant Pool of Money.”

“I do think that I’ve noticed sort of like phrases appearing in newspapers that seemed like maybe they were influenced by the show,” he said. “But I can’t tell for sure.”

Rosen had his own anecdote that indicated at least one instance of influence. While working on his Idea Lab piece he Twittered his readers, asking how the This American Life episode had affected them.

“There’s a young reporter that follows my feed on Twitter,” he said. “She writes for a newspaper in Lafayette, Indiana. The next day after I Twittered about the This American Life episode, she had an assignment to do a localized version of the story about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and whether local bankers were affected. It was very much a local version of that story. She found she was way more prepared for that assignment because she had gone through the transcript of this show.”

So in this instance, he said, a news consumer had been able to take a story and build upon it, using the knowledge she gathered to inform her own reporting.

“It’s not only necessary background for the future readers of news, but also the future writers. It’s an enabling narrative for both the users and the producers.”

Ever since the National Enquirer broke the story that former Senator John Edwards had visited a Beverly Hills hotel to meet with his alleged lover and love child, there has been no shortage of accusations that mainstream media outlets were ignoring the story. These criticisms were magnified after an email sent by Los Angeles Times blog editor Tony Pierce to his blogging staff leaked to the outside world.

“There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair,” Pierce wrote on July 24. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.”

Many took this to mean that the LA Times was actively trying to suppress the story from gaining any ground. They claimed that the email was indicative of the newspaper’s attempt to protect the former Democratic senator.

I spoke to Pierce for a few minutes on the phone today. He said the decision to send the email came after several senior editors at the Times met that day.

“The Opinion LA blog had already written about the rumors from the National Enquirer,” he explained. “We knew some of the other blogs wanted to write about it or were thinking about writing about it. And at that point we were like, ‘you know, we already have our metro desk working on a story and before we just kind of write a whole bunch of stuff about the National Enquirer article, why don’t we give our metro desk a chance to see what they can find.’ That’s when they said, ‘OK Tony, why don’t you write this letter to your bloggers.”

When I brought up the argument made by many that they were trying to bury the story, Pierce pointed out that one of the blogs had already written about it. The editors simply wanted to give the metro reporters a chance to dig into it and see if they could find any new information, he said, rather than just having the Times website create a bunch of noise.

I asked the blog editor about his relationship with his bloggers and whether they normally had to run stories by him before publication. He responded that with 43 blogs under his helm, that would be impossible.

“Most of the time they’re on their own,” he said. “Most of the time they write about what they normally write about. Sometimes what I’ll do is give them some story ideas — I’ll say something like, ‘you know, I noticed you haven’t written about this yet. Have you noticed this?’ Or if they’re not sure about a story, like some of them were with this Edwards story, they’ll come to me and say, ‘what do you think?’ With this specific story there were some blogs that don’t normally handle politics that wanted to write about it. So that’s why they pitched it to me. Instead of writing to a couple of the bloggers, I just wrote to all of them and said why don’t we just hold off, because all we have is this one source.”

I asked Pierce if the metro desk had the chance to follow up on the story, and if so, would he send out another post allowing his bloggers to write about it. He said that to his knowledge the LA Times reporters hadn’t found any additional information and expressed some skepticism of the National Enquirer story’s authenticity.

“I was really just reminding the bloggers that they write for the LA Times and they happen to be using blogging as a publishing platform,” Pierce said. “This isn’t something you would normally see in a newspaper more than once. We already wrote the one post quoting the National Enquirer and I don’t think you’d see more than that if there were no blogs and this was just a newspaper. That’s what I was just saying to them, that until we have a better source, let’s hold off on being part of the speculation.”

But near the end of our interview he interjected and said that he probably could have worded the email better.

“What I should have said is that if you find information — because these are real reporters — if you find any more information, or if there’s something that’s out there that you come across put out by a more reputable source, write it up and let’s talk about it. That’s probably one thing that I wish I could have said.”

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in the middle of a column that tells bloggers to get off his lawn, has this to say.

But we’re finding this works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It’s a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.

Go tell that to the dozens of sources I’ve conducted interviews with for this very blog within the last two weeks.

So I took some time off from work and headed to the beach this weekend. I had zero internet access so I’m completely out of the loop. I’m about to fire up my RSS feed and start catching up, so expect blogging to resume shortly.

I should have a pretty good feature article coming out soon.

From a Deceiver comment thread:

Besides, as a Caucasian-American I’m offended at the Joker running around in whiteface.

Hehe