Word: huffington
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...HuffPo has also flourished by outsmarting everyone else. If you type "Nick Schuyler" into Google today, the Huffington Post's mashup account will appear above the original story in the St. Petersburg Times. That's Peretti's doing. In his hands, the site is particularly adept at what's known as search-engine optimization - making Google love you. How it's done is complicated and mostly secret, but one illuminating example came after the death of actor Heath Ledger. HuffPo fashioned its story so that anyone Googling a variation on the words "Keith Ledger" would see the HuffPo story...
That's just part of what concerns veteran news hands about HuffPo's rise. In December the site's Chicago section was found to have been plagiarizing. "This was a problem with an intern," says Huffington. "There was no excuse, and we corrected it." When I point out that the initial story the site posted in March on Nick Schuyler, the football player who survived a storm at sea, carried Zaleski's byline even though 80% of the copy was taken verbatim from the St. Petersburg Times, Huffington says that the story drew from several sources - and that they...
...never lost the ability to win people over. "Before we launched, I just asked all my friends to write," says Huffington. "And then they get such a reaction that they get hooked and start writing a lot." Her special brand of Greco-American wrangling lured so many boldface names that the merely interesting wanted to write for her too. The Huffington Post now has 3,000 bloggers, all - media moguls take note! - unpaid. (Read TIME's 1995 story on Huffington, "A Woman on the Verge...
While this is wily, it's legal. But news organizations may not tolerate others cherry-picking their content and repurposing it for profit for much longer. "Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post," says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "It's not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it's about the value." There are other aggregators, but HuffPo is the most tempting. "It's a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line" between fair and unfair use of copy, Benton notes...
Some of the journalistic resentment exists clearly because it's populist media done better than it's been done before. Another part of it is really about Huffington. HuffPo's speedy rise to prominence, courtesy of others' work, reminds some of its founder's own journey. Female ambition is a curious force. When its outlets are blocked, it sometimes seems to settle on the nearest object - a spouse, a child, a cause. But in rare cases, it finds its perfect vehicle. When that happens, it's best to get out of the road or jump in for the ride. Huffington...