Lesson from AOL-Huffington Post buyout: The mediocre shall inherit the Web

[Renew Deal]

<snip>
It's not just about AOL -- never more than a bad joke in even the best of times -- or the Huffington Post. It's bigger than that. It's about how the Web, and especially Google, rewards mediocrity. It's what I like to call The Crappification of Everything™.

The Web has become like television, where if a show is both good and popular it's almost a happy accident. Mostly we get reality TV that's cheap to produce and painful to watch yet still manages to attract lots of eyeballs -- biggest losers, indeed.

When HuffPo launched in 2005, it was unlike anything most of us had seen before. Even if you hated Arianna's politics, you had to admit she'd found a niche with an oddball mix of actual writers and celebutantes, blogging about whatever floated their boat that particular day. It was often terrible, but it was also fresh and new.

What is the Huffington Post today? As I noted in my last post, it's become the Wal-Mart of Web news –- you'll find the pork rinds next to the shotgun pellets and behind the lawn chairs.

What happened? Money happened. Ad dollars started rolling in, but only to a point. Arianna & Co. quickly realized the only way to boost ad revenue was to dramatically increase the volume of posts appearing on the site, and the only way to do that was to hire newbies and have them crank out high-speed rehashes of everything everyone else was reporting, with an emphasis on Google-friendly photo slideshows and celebrity gossip. Sure, the celebutantes and reporters were still there, blogging away for free, but their voices were drowned out by the cacaphony.
<snip>

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/lesson-aol-huffington-post-buyout-the-mediocre-shall-inherit-the-web-940

[MineralMan]

1. As a professional writer, I've seen the impact of the internet

personally. Prior to the growth of the Internet, magazine journalists were well paid. At the peak, I was getting $1 per word for my writing for computer publications. It was a tough gig to get, and the quality of what appeared was high. As the Internet grew, magazine sales dropped, since people were going to the web for information. As sales dropped, so did the number of writers making their living writing for magazines. The Internet was greedy for content, but standards for the writing were lower. Pay scales went lower and lower, as inexperienced writers filled the pages of many websites. Journalistic standards, multi-level editing procedures, and other factors that previously kept the accuracy and competence of content high, disappeared.

Now, it's tough to find any place to sell good writing at a price that makes it worthwhile. So, the quality continues to drop, with people being paid chump change for their work. Where did the good writers go? Well, they're writing content still, but for a different audience. I'm now writing complete websites for small businesses. The pay's OK, and my skills keep me busy because the content is generating sales and leads. I'm a marketing copy writer now, not a journalist. I'm still making a living, but not in the same way I used to. So it goes.

As long as a surplus of writers is willing to crank out words for no money, the pros will be writing other stuff.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. I'm not a professional writer, but I have had a few things published and...

this has been going on for all too long. I got enough "you'll be seen" proposals from startups and dying periodicals on their last gasps.

Work-for-hire was becoming the rule, not the exception, in print and the web just made sure it became the norm-- if you get paid at all.

[salvorhardin]

4. It's disheartening

The content mills are paying less per word than the pulps were in the 1930s! That is, if they're paying. Mostly they're not, as people trade the promise of commission based on page views for churning out a dozen blog post quality articles per day.

[progree]

3. News.yahoo.com's Opinion section dropped Huffington Post

I mainly get my news from http://news.yahoo.com. The Opinion section is at the bottom of the page. Before the AOL buyout of Huffington Post, the Opinion section had these sections:

Christian Science Monitor, RealClearPolitics, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic Wire, Huffington Post.

But the same day that I read about the AOL buyout of Huffington Post, the Huffington Post section was replaced by The Week. So now the only left-of-center viewpoint is "The Nation". The Weekly Standard and RealClearPolitics supply the right-wing view. The Atlantic Wire (associated with The Atlantic Magazine) might be mostly left, but they claim to be providing all points of view, as does, The Week.

[eleny]

5. I'm hoping that the news web site Keith Olbermann is launching will take the place of HP