The differencess between old and new media are continuing to blur. Like many blogs, Huffington Post includes news reports from conventional news sources. The New York Times reports that they are planning to do their own original reporting:
Arianna Huffington, who started HuffingtonPost.com, said yesterday that the site had hired Melinda Henneberger, a print journalist most recently with Newsweek magazine, as its political editor. The site has about 2.3 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the more popular blog sites.
Ms. Huffington said Ms. Henneberger would hire a number of other journalists to begin producing original content, “with attitude.”
“Now is the time to generate our own original content,” Ms. Huffington said. “It was always our intention, once we had the money, to hire people to do reporting.”
Softbank Capital, a venture capital group, invested $5 million in the site earlier this year. Ms. Huffington said she planned to hire investigative reporters as well as a multimedia team to do video reports and wanted to make the site more interactive.
The site already offers a mix of opinion and breaking news from wire services and other sources, but Ms. Huffington said she wanted to produce reported pieces that were expressed with individual voices.
“That’s the combination you need online,” she said, adding that unlike bloggers, who generally file when they want to, her reporters will have deadlines and regular schedules and will travel for their articles. Also unlike bloggers, Ms. Huffington said, they will be paid.
It will be interesting to see what journalistic standards are adhered to. The bias at Huffington Post is obvious, and is fine for an opinion dominated blog. It is hard to imagine them planning a totally objective news source, but investigative journalism with a liberal bias could still be of value. One problem often seen with web based journalism is a lack of regard for journalistic standards of accuracy, with sites such as Drudge being perfectly fine with releasing unsubstantiated information if it will create a buzz. Hopefully starting with established journalists will increase the chances of them producing a quality product.
