The biggest problem with the Huffington Post isn’t the incessant lewd and lurid clickbait used to lure eyeballs, but that the money derived from such garbage is used to support very, very little good journalism. The site has been touted as navigating the way forward for the news business, but it isn’t that. The company might as well be selling Ding Dongs or Whoppers. It’s a gigantic operation coming to very little good and some bad (e.g., its early support of the anti-vaccination movement helped propel that lunacy). Ultimately, the site is its own strange island having no ramifications beyond its borders for anyone who wants to do responsible journalism. It’s not a news business, really, just a business and a dubious one.
Early on in “Arianna Huffington’s Improbable, Insatiable Content Machine,” David Segal’s knowing New York Times Magazine article, the founder says this about a new vertical: “Let’s start iterating…let’s not wait for the perfect product.’’ And that’s true of the site writ large: It’s just iteration, and there’s no reason to anticipate it becoming perfect or even just good. That wait is over.
From Segal:
When most sites were merely guessing about what would resonate with readers, The Huffington Post brought a radical data-driven methodology to its home page, automatically moving popular stories to more prominent spaces and A-B testing its headlines. The site’s editorial director, Danny Shea, demonstrated to me how this works a few months ago, opening an online dashboard and pulling up an article about General Motors. One headline was ‘‘How GM Silenced a Whistleblower.’’ Another read ‘‘How GM Bullied a Whistleblower.’’ The site had automatically shown different headlines to different readers and found that ‘‘Silence’’ was outperforming ‘‘Bully.’’ So ‘‘Silence’’ it would be. It’s this sort of obsessive data analysis that has helped web-headline writing become so viscerally effective.
Above all, from its founding in an era dominated by ‘‘web magazines’’ like Slate, The Huffington Post has demonstrated the value of quantity. Early in its history, the site increased its breadth on the cheap by hiring young writers to quickly summarize stories that had been reported by other publications, marking the birth of industrial aggregation.
Today, The Huffington Post employs an armada of young editors, writers and video producers: 850 in all, many toiling at an exhausting pace. It publishes 13 editions across the globe, including sites in India, Germany and Brazil. Its properties collectively push out about 1,900 posts per day. In 2013, Digiday estimated that BuzzFeed, by contrast, was putting out 373 posts per day, The Times 350 per day and Slate 60 per day. (At the time, The Huffington Post was publishing 1,200 posts per day.) Four more editions are in the works — The Huffington Post China among them — and a franchising model will soon take the brand to small and midsize markets, according to an internal memo Huffington sent in late May.Throughout its history, the site’s scale has also depended on free labor. One of Huffington’s most important insights early on was that if you provide bloggers with a big enough stage, you don’t have to pay them.•
