Keep That Head Buried, Folks
Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco on the dark truth about HuffPo’s journalistic intent, another source of the infection that threatens to shred journalism while distracting the crowd by occasionally breaking news or having something real to say…
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.
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There is more and you should read it all. My apologies for grabbing so much of this article, but I want you all to see it and think about it… and note, I have not generated a single additional pageview in the process.
The serious objection to how HuffPo and others do business is not that they aggregate, but that they steal the content, make it a page view for them, and deny the source any value at all. The spin that it is all about aggregation and not about the outright theft of page views is cover for that simple truth.
Also, for clarity’s sake, there is this article from paidcontent.org that interviews the company’s new CEO: “Hippeau stressed:
The ironic thing about the cackling of the blogosphere on the demise of newspapers is that they think there’s going to be a better substitute outside “citizen journalism” — which will be an epic fail when trying to delve behind the walls of power. Idiots like that proto-conservative Kos are so arrogant about the web because THEY make revenue — they assume somebody somehow will make money off the web. But I don’t see it happening soon.
I think Dumenco (and therefore Poland?) is way off base. Huffpo, as he said, linked to the original Heather Graham interview at Daily Mail. Obviously, anyone interested will follow the link. That has to be a net gain for Daily Mail, not a siphoning of their income. More people are presumably following Huffpo than Daily Mail, at least in the U.S. And if the story is so reprehensible, why should Huffpo be criticized for linking to it, and the DM gets a free ride for printing it in the first place.
Then Dumenco puts an idiot spin on Arianna’s obvious statement that Huffpo’s bloggers come and go, and write only “when the spirit moves them, so they can be part of the conversation.” Anyone who reads Huffpo knows this, but Dumenco thinks that means she’s saying they’re “marginal wannabes.” I don’t see a single valid criticism of Huffingtonpost in his whole stupid blog.
All I know is, Heather Graham is hot.
I don’t disagree that Dumenco goes too far by sweating her many free bloggers. Smart play… free content… nothing new… not what actually drives that site.
But the rest is just wrong. As someone who runs an aggregation site and has for 6 years, I can assure you that most people are now reading bits and pieces of everything. What HuffPo does is grab the key piece of the content that they didn’t create it, monetize it for themselves by posting about as much as the majority of readers will ever consume and that link to the Daily Mail goes unclicked by a significant percentage of the people who read the post.
This is stealing.
Oddly, I just followed a link on Cinematical and saw the same thing. They took 10 images from Worth1000, made a gallery of it as though it was their content, and provided a link to Worth1000 for the rest of the entries.
But sorry… that is stealing from Worth1000. And that is the hard part. One or two, as an example, sure. But 10? Posted across 10 pages? Crosses the line.
If you don’t get this, Muckle, then you probably produce no content of value and don’t understand that everyone is out there trying to find a way to make it work. Huffington Post can make it work, marginally, by respecting reasonable rights of content creators. But that isn’t enough. And it is theft, pure and simple, whatever the law is.
It is certainly complicated by the fact that so much of the web is a reflection of things that were initiated by others. Moreover, the assumption that most of us have that walled content won’t work is not a big reach. Also, big media tends to overreach when enforcing rules, usually hurting non-pros and true fair users and rarely hitting bigger sites, so the enforcement of fair rules end up being unfair too.
All that said, just because people have the tools and the access does not make it right or reasonable to abuse the work of others. Linking, yes. Mining content from others, not for commentary (the creation of new content), but simply for presentation, no.
Well, DP, I certainly get your example from Worth1000. The Heather Graham example seems borderline. What about Drudgereport, or the center column on MCN? Certainly those links draw me here, and I would not otherwise follow most of the websites linked to. Anyway, if the question amounts to what is the legitimate way to make money from the internet, or from journalism, I certainly do not have that answer. I would be interested in knowing what is the legitimate way to make money, period. Me and Vlad Lenin and cousin Karl might suggest that capitalism and profit-taking are also theft.
Anyway, I go to Huffpo for the commentary from the part-time occasional bloggers. If surfers are after titillation, they must be pretty ignorant to think that is the best source for it.
“The Heather Graham example seems borderline. What about Drudgereport, or the center column on MCN? Certainly those links draw me here, and I would not otherwise follow most of the websites linked to.”
You don’t see the difference between posting headline-style links and making a new article out of pieces of somebody else’s article? That’s like equating a bibliography entry for a work with a three page excerpt from the the work itself.
It would be like Dave’s main page links taking you to another MCN page with the full text of Heather Graham Loves Tantric Sex and lots of comments below it, along with a link somewhere in the page to the actual page source. Honestly if the whole article is on MCN, why am I going to click another link?
You guys didn’t even look at the Heather Graham page, did you. Huffpo provided nothing at all there, basically only the link. Nothing more than the small paragraphs DP sometimes puts before his links. Although, of course, anything can be abused. But why would Dave put any links on his page at all then? Why don’t you just follow the original sources? Lazy bustards. 😉 DP sells advertising on MCN, no? But who looks at advertising online anyway? Are ya noobs? Never heard of adblocker plugins for your browser? Old Wells’ site is unwatchable otherwise. But the question still comes down to how to make money, and I still don’t know the answer to that. Me gazing at ads ain’t gonna make anybody any money nohow.
Here’s the whole thing. just to show how much was posted on HuffPost. Original is here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/07/heather-graham-tantric-se_n_212240.html
Heather Graham: Tantric Sex ‘Works For Me’
Heather Graham and Sting have something in common.
While promoting her small role in “The Hangover,” Graham told a UK paper how she enjoys tantric sex. Graham is currently dating director Yaniv Raz.
She told the Daily Mail of tantric sex:
I first got into it when I was filming The Guru in 2002 and I haven’t looked back. What most people know about tantric sex is that Sting does it and it lasts eight hours. But he’s not having sex continually. You can take a bath, massage your partner, listen to music. The idea is that you let the whole thing build very slowly until finally you merge with your partner. It works for me.
What’s not working for her is levitation, although Graham claims she has a goal to do that:
So far I’ve only succeeded in my dreams. I practice transcendental meditation and there is a phase where you’re meant to lift off the ground. It hasn’t happened yet. I’ll manage it one day. In fact, I’m aiming beyond levitation. I want to be able to fly like a superhero. I won’t be happy until I can fly across oceans and cities, saving people from being murdered.
Read the whole Q&A here. (They post to the original Daily Mail piece: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1190612/Heather-Graham-good-Catholic-girl-way-Madonna-is.html)
Muckle… again… you are on some other planet. Ad sales are the ONLY revenue stream for online right now. Page views are, for most sites, dollars. Period.
Well, Dave, there are sites that sell actual product (not “product” in Hollywood terminology), like Amazon and so on. And some of craigslist classified categories cost money. As I understand it, some of the online ad money only gets paid if someone clicks through. And if plain-old page-view money for ads fails to work (because, for example, sophisticated surfers never see them), then that revenue stream will dry up, so we can’t count on that long-term. What alternate planet are you talking about, then?
Your original point, as I understood it, was that Huffpo steals by aggregating content from other sites, by including enough “appropriated” content so that the reader doesn’t click through. A dubious point, to me, because (to use the extant example) people looking for Heather Graham-type infotainment titillation are by and large never going explicitly to Huffpo to find it (which would be grotesquely inefficient), and even less-so to the originating Daily Mail.
So for the few extra hits that resulted for both parties, it would seem to be win-win.
Obviously, selling stuff is a model… oy.
By dancing around this one example, you are missing the avoiding the argument.
HuffPo IS selling Heather Graham wants tantric sex as bait for its readers and got more people to click on their page with that story than anything else they published that month. It is also why Daily Mail does that kind of blather.
My point remains… linking to an array of stories, servicing your community is one thing. Publishing content derived exclusively from someone else’s work – which they do on almost all of their links – is thievery.
If you want to count what’s in the pockets of the copyright holder to determine how it should be valued, then you are missing the point of having the copyright. How I am exploiting my copyright does not determine whether others have the right to exploit it for free.
Muckle, Poland doesn’t block out paragraphs on the front page. He pulls a sentence as a direct quote and then provides the link. He doesn’t block out a meaty quote which links to another in-house page containing the entire pertinent section, which then contains a link to the original story.
HuffPo pulls sensational bits that do not accurately reflect the original article, then repurposes the hot part as a new content page. Newser does the same thing as a way to stop people from surfing away.
Yeah, I think HuffPo’s aggregation method is pass borderline. One or two sentences to tease the user to click on the link is ok, but they often have paragraphs. At least they provide a link. Although if I’m the creator of the content, I would still rather have the HuffPo article with the link than nothing at all.
Although, what do you think is worst: her method or people who just regurgitate news from Variety and Hollywood Reporter without links? I think that’s far worst.