Comments on: [2b2k] Is HuffPo killing the news?

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:09:17 +0000

[n.b. this is a brief blog comment, not a Ph.D. thesis - it does not delve into every detail and nuance, it is a sketch not blueprint] The overall issue is that HuffPuff demonstrates the failure of the attention-guru solution to funding journalism, which is supporting oneself by monetizing attention, Attention, ATTENTION. Roughly, if business X does journalism and tries to get attention, while business Y concentrates on only attention and "aggregates", then from winner-take-all and "power-law" network effects, Y will completely swamp X. Oh, Y will credit or link X, and tell X to be happy from all the traffic Y is sending its way, but that doesn't pay the bills. There is no answer to this which is easy, and even worse, marketable on the guru gigs.

By: Skip Malette

Skip Malette — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:00:26 +0000

This little piece, …journalism’s deep problems with its business models, gave me pause. Did Journalism ever have a business model other than going to work for a newspaper? Somewhere in dim history it probably did. However, news distribution was the business model of newspapers. That model is going, going… Journalists are working to adapt to this new reality far better than the old distribution models. HuffPo is only one representative of the change.

By: davidw

davidw — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:02:22 +0000

Gregory, not only do I agree with you about copyright, that’s why I posted the Constitutional language. As Jamie Boyle says (although I think he may have cited someone else(!)), no known incentive has caused dead authors to produce more works.

By: gregorylent

gregorylent — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:58:34 +0000

at this point, of human density, of hyperconnectivity, i think it is difficult to make the point that copyright has much to do with “to promote the progress of science and useful arts” …

it seems to now have the opposite effect…

huffpo and ilk are recursions, filters of filters, curations of curations … this extends to infinity .. the thing to understand, so-called original sources are themselves curations, filters, povs and perhaps there decline from a business pov is that very abstraction.disconnection from actual reality.