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Arianna's 'Super-Blog'

Jan Frel | April 25, 2005 - 12:44am | 5 comments | Email This!

Katharine Q Seelye falls for the same premise that led to the creation of The Huffington Post -- namely that if famous people blog together, it'll be reason enough to read it: "Get ready for the next level in the blogosphere. Arianna Huffington, the columnist and onetime candidate for governor of California, is about to move blogging from the realm of the anonymous individual to the realm of the celebrity collective."

If you create a group blog composed of the likes of Warren Beatty, Walter Cronkite, and James Fallows, everyone will read it, won't they? They will at first, that's for sure. There's something to be said for the celebrity effect of blogging, in the way that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a following with his Blog Maverick. Personally, I look forward to RSSing Gart Hart's musings.

But I think the Huffington Post will eventually deal a great deal of harm to pundit celebrity because these elites have shed the media that distributed them to fame, and jumped into an arena where any "anonymous individual" has access to the same tools they do to communicate, imitate, and criticize.

Additionally, I don't understand why there's any sense of competition between Drudge and what Arianna has going. The Drudge Report is a human-powered news aggregator with a few hundred permalinks at the bottom. The Huffington Post sounds like a blog newspaper. Is this just good MSM and Web PR on Arianna's part?

If you had the time, staff, and resources (and Lord, I pray for it every day) to filter through the nine million blogs out there and aggregate the 5,000 best "anonymous" writers under one roof in the rough form of a newspaper site like the New York Times, the Huffington Post would get a serious run for its money, as would any other online journalistic outlet.

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Comments

great deal of harm to "pundit celebrity"?

by Jon Garfunkel on April 25, 2005 - 9:07am

Not sure what you mean here. Those people (Jarvis et al) wishing for the big media to embrace blogging have got what they've asked for.

ok, so i'm pedantic

by Christian Crumlish on April 25, 2005 - 4:04pm

In the blog world, a permalink indicates an archival link to a specific item that will permanently work, even when the item is no longer displayed on the site's main page. There is some confusion abroad about this word, and some also use it as Jan has above to indicate a link to an outbound site that stay permanently on the main page (what a blogger might call her "blogroll links"). I think we need two distinct words for these things or we risk confusion.

Or maybe it doesn't matter at all?

..
The Power of Many . Edgewise . X-POLLEN

—

..
The Power of Many . Edgewise . X-POLLEN

right you are

by Jon Garfunkel on April 26, 2005 - 12:47am

Yes permalinks are special links, invented for blogs, which trashed the notion of hyperlinks to begin with. Heh-- readers too lazy to click to another page!

Drudge does not have permalinks. Nor does he have content, witty commentary, reader forums, pictures of his cats, discursions about air travel, or anything else associated with blogs. I'm not sure what his purpose is, from a media standpoint. So I agree with you Jan that there's no real competition between Huffington and Drudge, it's a joke.

But I still don't get what Jan's point is here. Nor do I follow Jay Rosen or Joan Walsh, quoted in the article, at all. Should anyone be surprised that a medium promised as "so easy, anyone can do it" will be taken over the ol' MSM and celeb-pundits.

Also, another consequence: Consider the "People who call themselves bloggers and do something resembling journalism deserve the privileges of journalists, such as source protection." Well, time to enter a whole new class of people into this little blogging party.

Big Media Will Lap It Up

by Kate Kaye on April 26, 2005 - 1:26pm

Jan writes that the H Post will damage "pundit celebrity" because celebs have (I guess in aligning with Huffer?) dissed mainstream media. Puleeeze. First off, mainstream gossip hounds are chomping at the bit to read the sludge they'll be dishing. The Huffington Post Report will be a segment on E News Daily, Best Week Ever, Robin's "news" coverage on Stern, and any number of other big media shows, not to mention being mentioned in endless gossip tabloids and entertainment columns in rags posing as newspapers.

As for jumping "into an arena where any 'anonymous individual' has access to the same tools they do" -- whatever. They're already adored, exploited, mocked and literally naked all over the Web anyway. They may as well add in their own two cents.

But overall, most of 'em who think anyone cares what they think about social security or A.N.W.R. or anything other than what designer they're wearing or which Jen they're dating are more delusional than I thought.

—

Kate Kaye
Editor, News and Campaign '08
ClickZ News

Not so

by Jan Frel on April 26, 2005 - 6:10pm

But wait Kate, I didn't write that the Huffington Post will damage pundit celebrity "because celebs have dissed mainstream media." I write that it will do so because "these elites have shed the media that distributed them to fame."

"As for jumping "into an arena where any 'anonymous individual' has access to the same tools they do" -- whatever."

Whatever?! It's what makes Pitchforkmedia.com, a handful of "anonymous individuals" who work out of a basement in Illinois, a more powerful arbiter of what constitutes good music than a critic at Rolling Stone. Same thing goes for Huffington Post. As celebrity pundits increasingly use the web as the starting place from which to express themselves -- and this is what the H. Post is an example of -- they put themselves in serious competition with the anybodies out there, because the competition is a click away. Of course, this is not an overnight thing, but it's happening pretty fast. Do I need to elaborate what the consequences of this are?

You are quite right that some of the Huffington Post will trickle back to the MSM, but I don't think that's terribly important. Do you? You characterized what would come back to the MSM as "sludge," after all.

*And Christian and Jon... if those permanent links to web pages on Drudge's site aren't "permalinks," give me another word and I'll use it. Just "links" ?