What is the Huffington Post, really?
Trashy Parasitism as a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme? Hi, HuffPo
What it comes down to is this: What is the Huffington Post, really? It likes to pretend that it’s a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim. It also likes to masquerade as a forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting journalistic institution, but it pays only a handful of actual journalists, and its idea of “journalism” is often downright parasitic of the work of real journalistic institutions.
And it gets worse: On the day, last week, that a Norwegian journalist interviewed me about why Arianna Huffington is so controversial, the most popular story on HuffPo was “Heather Graham: Tantric Sex ‘Works For Me.’” I decided to do some math so I could explain to this journalist why HuffPo’s brand of blogging and “aggregating” is so often problematic. By HuffPo’s own tally, more than a quarter million readers viewed the Heather Graham post, which quoted 13 sentences, totaling 142 words, from Britain’s Daily Mail — a paper that (stupidly, naively, I suppose) pays its entertainment reporters. HuffPo’s contribution to the, uh, discourse? Just 58 words of its own — which simply set up the Daily Mail’s interview with Graham and further summarized the article.
Animal House 2.0: Huffpo Only Appeals to Lesbians and Horny Boys
Huffpo, Arianna, Nico Pitney, and Eric Hippeau have created a backlash amongst mainstream women by created an Internet version Animal House 2.0, many women say. It’s a blogging fiasco and has turned into Animal House Internet content.