Huffington glories in carving the meat out of a competitor’s story, throwing a search-engine optimized (SEO) headline on it, and posting it. Old-media types don’t feel right about rewriting the copy of their competitors and calling it a story. But instead of impeding her, those limitations actually gave Huffington an advantage over other sites- Slate included-that hewed to old-media standards. How to account for Huffington’s remarkable success? If you’ve ever edited Huffington’s raw copy (I have) or read a galley of one of her books before the published version comes out (which I’ve also done), you know that she’s not much of a journalist. But in this instance, AOL has handed Huffington the keys to its entire editorial kingdom-national, local, financial, as well as MapQuest and Moviefone-and christened her president and editor of AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group. Ordinarily, when a gigantic media organization swallows a startup like HuffPo, it lies about wanting to preserve the founder and all the talent he or she has assembled in their leadership roles.
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