No One Could Have Predicted

That once Arianna Huffington was allowed to smurf up all the kindling feeding the Left's new media, she'd channel the vital energy of a movement into a piecework sweatshop shithole designed solely to enrich  Arianna Huffington, her special friends and sycophants.

From TKTK Gawker:

Hell Is Working at the Huffington Post

Talk to someone who works at the Huffington Post these days and inevitably one word will keep popping up: “demoralized.” “I’ve never seen people so demoralized” is what a typical HuffPost employee usually says.

A spike in despair makes a certain amount of sense. People are leaving the place in droves. (A huge portion of the business and tech team fled has fled within the last two months, for instance.) The new leadership is said to be of a particularly beastly nature. The site is going through yet another massive, and sure to fail, internal reorganization, moving its beleaguered editors into new complex groupings that will soon be abandoned. And that’s before you get to the small question of whether or not HuffPost will be sold off in the near future, due to AOL’s recent acquisition by Verizon.

But to anyone who has worked at the site for any period of time, as I have, it’s a little bizarre that people could be more demoralized now than at any point in the past, because the Huffington Post has always been an essentially miserable place, with a workplace culture so brutal and toxic that it would meet with approval from committed sociopaths across the land. If things are getting worse there, they have to be really, really bad.

It’s hard to imagine, to pick just one example, how things could be worse than during the Jimmy Soni era. Jimmy, you may recall, was given authority over the entire HuffPost newsroom as managing editor in 2012 based on his stellar journalistic credentials, like being Arianna Huffington’s top assistant and a former McKinsey consultant. 

Unsurprisingly, he ran HuffPost into the ground...

And when I say "no one", of course I mean lots of despised outsider Liberals.

Like me, f'instance :-)

A sample platter...

From 2010:  Vocabulary by Mario Savio: Heart by J. Pierpont Morgan.

From 2010:  “Huffington Post" is to “Writer” as…

A. “Logging” is to “Forest”

B. “Industrial Fishing” is to “Ocean”

C. “Coal Mining” is to “Appalachian Mountaintops”

D. All of the above.

From 2011:

She Is Trampling out the Vintage 

Where the Grapes of Wealth are stored.

I wonder which of her books about corporate cruelty -- "Pigs at the Trough" or perhaps "Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream"? -- Ms. Huffington offered as a lovely parting gift to the 900 journalists and others who were sacked in order to fund her AOL windfall.

I also wonder which of her books on the villainy and irredeemable insanity of the Right -- "Fanatics & Fools" or "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe" -- she offered as a lovely Welcome Wagon token to the irredeemably bent, lunatic fringe Right wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart as he was brought on-board the Huffington Pose Post as a front-page contributor? (Having enticed Bloody Mary Matalin into coming on her dreadful radio show to espouse the virtues of civility and Centrism, and spent a chunk of her winter canoodling at Davos with our Ant Overlords,

After stopping by dueling parties hosted by Time/Fortune and the University of Chicago, I made it over to the Morosani hotel (where there was no evidence of that morning's explosion) for the Coca-Cola cocktail reception, hosted by its CEO, Muhtar Kent. And I do mean hosted. His ebullience was all-embracing, constantly introducing his guests to one another: "Arianna, you must meet my great Greek friend... Charlie [Rose], did you see Tim Geithner?" 

After the Coke party, I made my way to a dinner hosted by Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, Rev. Sally Grover Bingham, Kathryn Murdoch, and Doug Shorenstein that focused on innovative ways to protect our oceans against overfishing. During the meal, David Gergen and I moderated a discussion that touched on many concepts I knew little about, including "catch shares" (which work by allotting a percentage of a catch to fishermen, while meeting conservation goals). It's a very "beyond left and right solution" to the problem that has garnered investments from the Carlyle Group and support from the Murdoch family. Worth noting: fish was served at dinner.

I credit Ms. Huffington with a innate and enthusiastic sense for at sloughing off any inconvenience principles as the social occasion and business opportunity demands.)

All of which apparently momentarily dragged Bill Keller's (the man who pays David Brooks and Ross Douthat to play with their poo on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times) attention away from his unholy work at an undisclosed Swiss laboratory [where he has (allegedly) been trying to re-animate the mortal remains of William Safire] long enough to publicly tsk-tsk Ms. Huffington.

Sample:

"Aggregation" ... too often ... amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.

And:

Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company's announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.

Ms' Huffington answered back, but as you cannot help notice...

"Perhaps unsettled by the fact that, when combined, The Huffington Post and AOL News have over 70 percent more unique visitors than the New York Times, and that HuffPost/AOL News' combined page views in January 2011 were double the page views of the Times (1.5 billion vs. 750 million), New York Times executive editor Bill Keller decided to unleash an exceptionally misinformed attack on HuffPost in a column released today and slated for this weekend's NYT Magazine.

..."

...that, despite her citations below the lede (Google it yourself: Arianna doesn't need any eyeballs from me), the roundhouse Ms. Huffington throws is clearly not about her journalistic chops or writing skills or her capacity to inform her audience or limn her ideals. No, she's bragging about the effectiveness of her business model. Her ability to drive traffic.

Because up in the blogosphere's skyboxes, that is what this has always been about.

And so, like Doug Quail shaking off a cheapo memory implant from Rekal, Incorporate ("We Remember It For You Wholesale"), some of us now awaken to find a world where people who gained wealth and power by proclaiming themselves to be our allies against brutal, existential adversaries...are actually not that way at all.

They are actually quite chummy

with those "adversaries"

and are setting up shop with them

a couple of blocks away, where the prospects are better, and the rubes haven't quite caught on yet.

Because that, boys and girls, is life in the NBA, where even after the bloodiest-seeming fights during which things one can never take back are flung with abandon, the next day Ruling Class Mommy and Ruling Class Daddy always kinda kiss and sorta make up (from the same Bill Keller a few days later):

Also, for the record, I like Arianna Huffington. Sorry to disappoint those folks yearning for a Wrestlemania smackdown, but I think she’s a shrewd entrepreneur and a charming woman. Also, we seem to share a belief in hiring professional journalists; she’s hired some good ones from The Times. (We won’t dwell on the fact that her new owners at AOL laid off 200 journalists to help pay for the acquisition of The Huffington Post.) So, really, I like Arianna.

because that's what the marketplace demands.

And so, finally, two hardworking pros can put down their respective media-empire joysticks for a few hours and retire to the back room away from the frantic, meaningless puppet-theater dickwaving that keeps the yokels goggling and the lovely, lovely traffic rolling in to partake in the one activity every red-blooded, multinational mogul enjoys.

Money fight!

Her truth is marching on.

The Moving Hack Writes

And, having writ, moves on.

Nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out
A Word of it.

Back in the Yaer of Our Lord 1996, when Arianna Huffington was a Republican activist and bundler for Newt Gingrich --

WHY NEWT MUST RUN 

NOV 27, 1995,

BY ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

LAST WEEK, NEWT GINGRICH SPOKE a few surprising words -- words that went astonishingly unnoticed, given their ominous ring. "We may lose next year," he told the annual meeting of GOPAC, the political-action committee he ran for nine years, "but in 11 months, working as a team, we made the tough decisions and laid our careers on the line." Wait a moment: lose next year? Was that Newt Gingrich, the leader of the political realignment, slayer of the New Deal, the most powerful congressional politician since Henry Clay?

...

What's going on here? How can a president who only last month backtracked on his proudest achievement-the 1993 tax increase -- and who is held in contempt by his own troops on the Hill have a 52 percent approval rating? And how can the speaker of the House, who has delivered on the legislative agenda of the revolution more decisively than even his most ardent supporters thought possible, have a 49 percent negative rating? Most important, how can the revolution move forward when Republicans have allowed its opponents to define it? 

...

If we are confident in the revolution, how can we continue to sleepwalk through the nominating process, and wake up, when it's too late, with a nominee using the megaphone of a presidential campaign to explain to the nation a revolution he does not understand? The prospect is as painful as hearing a Schubert song warbled by Roseanne.

Running for president would undoubtedly be the biggest gamble of Gingrich's political career. And there is absolutely no self-interested reason for him to do it. He has said that he would run only if there were a clear moral imperative for him to do so. As he and his wife contemplate the decision over the Thanksgiving break, here are not one but two moral imperatives, and, for good measure, a strategic imperative as well. 

...

-- Arianna's editor at "The Weekly Standard" -- Mr. David Brooks -- noted that while Republicans were sporting a raging Libertarian stiffy (spearheaded by that "whitehot" activist Grover Norquist) --

UP FROM LIBERTARIANISM

12:00 AM, AUG 19, 1996 • BY DAVID BROOKS

... 

In 1995, the Republicans were filled with libertarian fervor. Activist Grover Norquist, who was whitehot during the first months of the Congress, explained that the Republican majority had been elected by the "Leave Us Alone" coalition -- by people who simply wanted government off their backs. Norquist was quoted in a Washington Post profile saying that the sight of the executive branch buildings in Washington made him "physically ill. . . . Neo-American fascism, stuff that looks like Albert Speer designed it."

...

-- Libertarianism was inherently a failed and doomed governing philosophy which the GOP was well on its way to abandoning:

... 

In June the Republican freshmen, led by Radanovich, released a "Vision Statement," which layered religious and civil society thinking over the old Contract with America base. "We believe that reducing the federal government should not and cannot occur without a renewal of family, religious, civic, and business institutions in American society," the statement declared. Suddenly you can't walk down a hallway on Capitol Hill without hearing a Republican explication of Arianna Huffington's phrase "effective compassion." "If I were asked to reduce the problem to one word, that word would be 'compassion,'" 

...

But the Republican change of emphasis also illustrates more profound shortcomings in the libertarian approach to domestic policy. The libertarians are great at rebutting liberalism, but, in Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield's words, "They are governed by logic rather than reason. Their individualism presupposes that individuals are strong and independent, and does nothing to make them so. Libertarians rely on self-interest, as is appropriate in a liberal democracy, but they do not see that when an individual is weak, it may be in his interest to be dependent on government. They forget that self-interest, in Tocqueville's famous phrase, must be 'well understood.'" 

...

Furthermore, the political reality at the moment is that American voters, while critical of some of the government programs we have, have not given up on government itself. Politicians who preach the harsh line of cut, cut, cut end up about where Phil Gramm did when he ran for president.

That was all of 12 years ago.

I wonder how it all worked out?


UPDATE:  If there is a God in Heaven...

New York Times Seeks Buyouts From 30 in Newsroom

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Aiming to cut costs in an increasingly troubled advertising environment, The New York Times announced on Monday morning that it would offer buyout packages to newsroom employees. While the primary goal of the buyout program is to trim managers and other nonunion employees from its books, the company is offering employees represented by the Newspaper Guild the chance to volunteer for buyout packages as well.

In a letter to the staff, Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times, said she was seeking 30 managers who are not union members to accept buyout packages. She stressed that the paper had been reducing as many newsroom expenses as possible, like leases on foreign and national bureaus. But the hiring The Times has done in recent years to help make it more competitive online has restored the newsroom to the same size it was in 2003 — about 1,150 people.

“There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced,” Ms. Abramson said in the letter.

...

A Reminder: Aggregation TeeVee

Coming very, very soon to a computer near you.

AOL to Launch Huffington Post Streaming Network in Second Quarter

10:38 AM PST 2/2/2012 by Georg Szalai

NEW YORK - AOL's Huffington Post Media Group will later this year launch the Huffington Post Streaming Network, which will offer live video featuring discussions about HuffPo stories and comments about them, company executives unveiled here on Thursday. Speaking to reporters at AOL's headquarters here a year after the Internet company acquired the Huffington Post, Roy Sekoff, founding editor of the Huffington Post Media Group who will head up the network, said it will feature live streaming video for 12 hours a day five days a week produced in AOL's New York and LA studios by a dedicated staff of at least 100 plus video on demand clips. Next year, programming will be expanded to 16 hours. Importantly, viewers will be "a central part of the show" as "people don't want to be told the news anymore," the executive highlighted. "Our community and engagement are unparalleled.

That is why we use the [tagline] 'conversations start here'. We are taking what the Huffington Post does and taking it to another medium." He said the goal is to reach viewers on their computers at work, as well as on their tablets and smartphones.

Expected to launch in the second quarter, the network could be programmed 9am-9pm ET, but the company hasn't made a final decision on the exact streaming times yet, he told THR.

Executives described the streaming network as a never-ending talk show. A demo video that Sekoff showed featured discussions between hosts and Huffington Post reporters, with bloggers or viewers patched in via Skype and Facebook comments read by a host. Segments that were part of the reel included "Defend Your Comment," which showed a Huffington Post blogger and her critic face off via video link, "Write The Headline," which asks readers/viewers to tweet in the headline for a Huffington Post story whose writer is outlining its content, and a look at headlines from around the Huffington Post, including its celebrity and politics sections.

...

The pitch meetings for this



must have been a hoot.



Of course, how it will end



we cannot know.

Ever Since I Shelved the "Driftington Post" Project

("Synthesizing the Narrative of a Generation!") I have found it almost impossible to even thumb through the great, sloppy midden pile of nipple slips, diet tips, tabloid sleaze, purloined excellence, occasional articles of genuine interest and, generally, the murmur of the New Age hipster end of the Davos wading pool talking to itself that HuffPo has become.

Arianna's House of Games was, is, and ever shall be an exercise in raw capitalist scammery dressed up in the best fair-market cotton Che tee-shirt money can buy, and once I had satisfied my morbid curiosity -- once I learned exactly how the simple, mechanical aggregation magic trick worked by doing it for a couple of weeks and once I had sussed out the 25 or so words which are in constant, Batman-Splat!-Pow!-Zowie! rotation inside the headline extruding algorithm -- I lost interest.

But every now and then I drop back over just to see

Today, for example, I stopped by.

First thing I noticed was that Rupert Murdoch's trophy wife -- Wendi Deng Murdoch -- had been given a choice piece of real estate atop the front page to promote her first movie.

Oh boy!

The word "lao tong," once holding a historic meaning, now had a modern and relevant definition for me. In fact, even before we launched the production process, I found my amazing family of lao tongs rallying around me. These connections kept me feeling brave. The wonderful writer Amy Tan introduced me to Lisa See's novel. Without Amy's friendship, I would never have been inspired to start this project. My great friend Florence Sloan joined as my supportive and strong producing partner and together we found ourselves lucky enough to...

Something something Wayne Wang.
Something something impressive figures from Silicon Valley.
Something something the mayor of San Francisco.
Something something my good friend Willow Bay.
Something something actress Bing Bing Li.
Something something Lisa See.
Something something Diane von Furstenberg.
Something something Nicole Kidman.
Something something Diana Taylor.
Something something Ivanka Trump.
Something something Ben Kingsley.
Something something Deb Lee Jackman.
Something something Senator Chris Dodd.

Something something.

Or, as President Jed Bartlet once said, "It's nice when we can do something for prostitutes once in a while, isnt it?"

Because, yes, we are talking about the trophy wife of that Rupert Murdock.

Perhaps I will drop by the Huffington Post for a few seconds again.

In three months.

Or seven.

Or sixteen.

She Is Trampling out the Vintage

Where the Grapes of Wealth are stored.

I wonder which of her books about corporate cruelty -- "Pigs at the Trough" or perhaps "Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream"? -- Ms. Huffington offered as a lovely parting gift to the 900 journalists and others who were sacked in order to fund her AOL windfall.

I also wonder which of her books on the villainy and irredeemable insanity of the Right -- "Fanatics & Fools" or "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe" -- she offered as a lovely Welcome Wagon token to the irredeemably bent, lunatic fringe Right wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart as he was brought on-board the Huffington Pose Post as a front-page contributor? (Having enticed Bloody Mary Matalin into coming on her dreadful radio show to espouse the virtues of civility and Centrism, and spent a chunk of her winter canoodling at Davos with our Ant Overlords,

After stopping by dueling parties hosted by Time/Fortune and the University of Chicago, I made it over to the Morosani hotel (where there was no evidence of that morning's explosion) for the Coca-Cola cocktail reception, hosted by its CEO, Muhtar Kent. And I do mean hosted. His ebullience was all-embracing, constantly introducing his guests to one another: "Arianna, you must meet my great Greek friend... Charlie [Rose], did you see Tim Geithner?" 

After the Coke party, I made my way to a dinner hosted by Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, Rev. Sally Grover Bingham, Kathryn Murdoch, and Doug Shorenstein that focused on innovative ways to protect our oceans against overfishing. During the meal, David Gergen and I moderated a discussion that touched on many concepts I knew little about, including "catch shares" (which work by allotting a percentage of a catch to fishermen, while meeting conservation goals). It's a very "beyond left and right solution" to the problem that has garnered investments from the Carlyle Group and support from the Murdoch family. Worth noting: fish was served at dinner.

I credit Ms. Huffington with a innate and enthusiastic sense for at sloughing off any inconvenience principles as the social occasion and business opportunity demands.)

All of which apparently momentarily dragged Bill Keller's (the man who pays David Brooks and Ross Douthat to play with their poo on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times) attention away from his unholy work at an undisclosed Swiss laboratory [where he has (allegedly) been trying to re-animate the mortal remains of William Safire] long enough to publicly tsk-tsk Ms. Huffington.

Sample:

"Aggregation" ... too often ... amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.

And:

Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company's announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.

Ms' Huffington answered back, but as you cannot help notice...

"Perhaps unsettled by the fact that, when combined, The Huffington Post and AOL News have over 70 percent more unique visitors than the New York Times, and that HuffPost/AOL News' combined page views in January 2011 were double the page views of the Times (1.5 billion vs. 750 million), New York Times executive editor Bill Keller decided to unleash an exceptionally misinformed attack on HuffPost in a column released today and slated for this weekend's NYT Magazine.

..."

...that, despite her citations below the lede (Google it yourself: Arianna doesn't need any eyeballs from me), the roundhouse Ms. Huffington throws is clearly not about her journalistic chops or writing skills or her capacity to inform her audience or limn her ideals. No, she's bragging about the effectiveness of her business model. Her ability to drive traffic.

Because up in the blogosphere's skyboxes, that is what this has always been about.

And so, like Doug Quail shaking off a cheapo memory implant from Rekal, Incorporate ("We Remember It For You Wholesale"), some of us now awaken to find a world where people who gained wealth and power by proclaiming themselves to be our allies against brutal, existential adversaries...are actually not that way at all.

They are actually quite chummy

with those "adversaries"

and are setting up shop with them

a couple of blocks away, where the prospects are better, and the rubes haven't quite caught on yet.

Because that, boys and girls, is life in the NBA, where even after the bloodiest-seeming fights during which things one can never take back are flung with abandon, the next day Ruling Class Mommy and Ruling Class Daddy always kinda kiss and sorta make up (from the same Bill Keller a few days later):

Also, for the record, I like Arianna Huffington. Sorry to disappoint those folks yearning for a Wrestlemania smackdown, but I think she’s a shrewd entrepreneur and a charming woman. Also, we seem to share a belief in hiring professional journalists; she’s hired some good ones from The Times. (We won’t dwell on the fact that her new owners at AOL laid off 200 journalists to help pay for the acquisition of The Huffington Post.) So, really, I like Arianna.

because that's what the marketplace demands.

And so, finally, two hardworking pros can put down their respective media-empire joysticks for a few hours and retire to the back room away from the frantic, meaningless puppet-theater dickwaving that keeps the yokels goggling and the lovely, lovely traffic rolling in to partake in the one activity every red-blooded, multinational mogul enjoys.

Money fight!

Her truth is marching on.

The AOL Comeback Plan

Step 1: Give a high-profile aggregator of other people's stuff that nice Davos Lady

an assload of dough. She's the one in the middle with her arm around Newt Gingrich.


Step 2: Fire an assload of people as clumsily as possible.

The "Disgusting" Way AOL Supposedly Fired People Yesterday

Nicholas Carlson

An ex-AOLer reached us this morning to say he thought it was "disgusting" the way AOL handled layoffs yesterday.

According to this guy, people got fired in groups of 20 to 30.

Source:

Managers had no clue if anyone on their teams were getting laid off. They were called into a separate meeting as a diversion, and then those being laid off were called into another and axed in a big group setting.

They pulled 20-30 people into a conference room and told them they "Don't have roles at aol anymore." [Severance is] 1 week for every year worked.

It's really quite appalling.

Step 3: Issue a a memo apparently written by robots programmed with nothing but Buzzspeak Bingo vocabulary that speaks inspiringly about branding and hyperlocality but fails to mention the massive fucking layoffs that are happening at that exact moment and are (I'm just guessing here) going to be the complete front-and-center focus of every actual living human at AOL, except by noting obliquely and fleetingly that management sorta regrets having to feed so many people to the rats (all emphasis added by me.)

From: Armstrong, Tim
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 5:46 PM
To: Armstrong, Tim
Subject: AOL's Next Step

AOLers -

Today is the next critical step on the comeback trail for AOL. We are creating a next generation hyper-local, national and global media company, and every action we've taken since AOL became an independent company has taken us further down that path. Our strategy remains clear: create high quality content experiences for consumers, at scale. As the digital landscape quickly evolves, so must our business, and we must continue to transform our organizational structure to one that works for today’s Internet.

Today, we are announcing an organizational structure that will significantly improve AOL’s ability to focus on growth. The structure will also impact areas of our team -- making the decision to reduce staff levels is a necessary part of rebalancing our workforce...

...
AOL is a global brand and a global opportunity and we are doing the hard work that will once again make the company an industry leader.
...

There are three important aspects to the structural changes we are making today. ... The third is our shift from India being a business process center to India being a consumer products group focused on the APAC market.

New Structure: Investing in our Brand Portfolio

AOL’s brand portfolio...

...an AOL brand architecture...

...build best-in-class brands...

AOL’s brands are measured with a consistent set of criteria...

...will continue the brand refinement process over time...

AOL will have four areas of significant brands...

We have a clear path to brand success...

...turbo-charged with the addition of the Huffington Post to our brand portfolio...

(driftglass aside/ In my head, this was the precise point where that thing happen when you have repeated a common word over and over to the point where it momentarily becomes complete meaninglessness and I started to ask myself, "Wait a minute, is 'brand' even a word?" Because by now it has started to sound so weird -- "Brand"..."Brand"..."Brand" -- that I worry that it is really some sort of trance-inducing, semi-subliminal, thought-clouding incantation and I have been cleverly ensorcelled into thinking that "Brand" was once-upon-a-time, in fact, a word with a definition and an origin and everything when is instead obviously just a dead, empty syllable banging against the window in the wind. Corporate glossolalia. "Brand"..."Brand"..."Brand". See what I mean? Just fucking gibberish. Which, I suspect, was sort of the point./ End driftglass aside.)

We have an AOL brand that enjoys 99% brand awareness...

...our commitment to reinvigorating the AOL Brand...

...begin to shift brand perception of AOL...

...named as one of the top 50 brands...

...continue to invest in the AOL Brand...

...support best-in-class brands...

It goes on...and on, but I haven't the heart.
Step 4 (Still top-secret and TBA): Reset the every clock in the world to 1994.

Step 5: Sit back and watch the underpants gnomes poop out one million ingots of solid WIN!

More HuffingJoy consolidated here.

I Almost Missed This Article

"by" Andrew Sullivan on the Huffington Post's Shameless Blogsploitation Business Model of building a personal fortune on cranking out a constant, steaming river of traffic-driving softcore porn, gossip and the unpaid-for writing of others...

The HuffPo Model: Rich Liberals Exploiting Blog-Serfs For Millions
14 Feb 2011 02:01 pm

In the wake of the AOL merger, Nate Silver wonders how much money the Huffington Post makes off its unpaid serfs bloggers:

The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. But it also has a huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15 percent of the site’s traffic. How many page views, then, does an individual blog post receive? And roughly what is it worth to The Huffington Post?

...

...lost as it was in the Daily Dish's usual barrage of posts made up mostly of free content gleaned from Politico, CNN, Ezra Klein, the National Review, Megan McCardle, PBS, The New York Times, Dave Weigel, Tyler Cowen, American Conservative Magazine David Frum, Wired, Twitter feeds, reprints of reader emails, the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Greenwald, Frank Rich, Matt Yglesias, Michael Medved, Christopher Hitchens, Felix Salmon, a variety of other Atlantic Writers, William Saletan, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, YouTube Videos, more David Frum, Nate Silver, Al-Jazeera, Radley Balko, still more reader emails, and so on.

The Huffpo Model -- which shares little DNA with traditional publishing, but bears a striking resemblance to industries like mountaintop mining or clear-cut logging insofar it concerns itself almost exclusively with the use of technology to ever-more-efficiently exploit its targeted resource while at the same time showing absolutely no concern with the disastrous, long-term damage their techniques are doing to the very environment which has made it possibly for them to prosper -- seems so perfectly engineered to kill whatever "professionalism" is still sloshing around at the bottom of the profession of writing that it is almost impossible to imagine that it was entirely accidental.

Mr. Sullivan's own addenda to the work of Nate Silver :

...
The temptation to run a website devoted almost entirely to hysterical claims about Obama's betrayals of the left and shirtless pictures of Hugh Jackman striding out of Australian surf becomes rather huge. Addictive even. But huge is the point. HuffPo's business model is sheer size. If you can throw as much content - free, borrowed or merely linked to - in one, sprawling place, you will generate a big enough crowd of eyeballs - 40 million of them a month at last count - to bring bigger and bigger advertisers to sign on.
...

was re-printed from his Sunday Times column.

Which, as he notes, is pay-walled.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I'm not sure what it is, but it does give me an excuse to re-run one of my favorite videos from Harlan Ellison:

In Belated Honor of Blogroll Amnesty Day

AOL tosses the Huffington Post $315 million in linky love.

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post
By JEREMY W. PETERS and VERNE G. KOPYTOFF
Published: February 7, 2011

The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.
...

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
...

Look up, Link down indeed.



And speaking of B.A.D, William K. Wolfrum explains why it is just a terrible idea...

Each year around this time, I'm contacted by a small cadre of political bloggers looking to push something they call "Blogroll Amnesty Day." The idea behind this day is for big, important, A-List, nationally recognized bloggers like myself to give out links to small, unimportant, D-List, not-recognized-in-ther-own-home bloggers. Beginning this year, B.A.D. (as the cool kids call it) is dedicated to the memory of B.A.D. Co-founder Al Weisel, a gifted writer and satirist who blogged under the name of Jon Swift.

Now, in theory, B.A.D. is a nice little socialist plan dedicated to encourage everyone to read Marx and wear drab clothing. Essentially, I am supposed to mention such bloggers as the angrily communistic Litbrit, or the anarchistic Fabulously Jinxed, or the angrier communisticier anarchisticier The Hunting of the Snark.

I have twice taken part in B.A.D., mostly out of pity for co-creator skippy the bush kangaroo, who has long suffered from the nightmare of ShiftandCapsLockaphobia. This year, however, I have decided I will not be involved. You see, B.A.D. is un-American. And I will not be a part of it.

My friends, since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the ownership in the U.S. media has dwindled to the point that a mere handful of major corporations now own roughly everything media related.

This, my friends, is the New American Way. Limited media ownership is what America is about. Freedom of Speech still reigns, but in a corporate-owned nation, that speech has now been bought and paid for by the select few. Independent small blogs and bloggers - such as Odd time Signatures, Freak Out Nation and Gay Persons of Color - are acting in a purely anti-American way when they try to add their voices to the limited media narrative.

...

While The left side of the Gorge persists in the pipe dream that such actions have meaning...

The good folks over at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo have posted a call for participation in Blogroll Amnesty Day, where we can call attention to 5 blogs we think are worthy of more attention. There are so many excellent blogs out there that it's hard to know where to start. Here's a handful of blogs making good contributions:

http://dadinleftfield.com/
http://onlyinamericablogging.blogspot.com/
http://thebookofcletis.blogspot.com/
http://disaffectedanditfeelssogood.blogspot.com/
http://whyaminotsurprised.blogspot.com/

And bloggers like the charmingly misguided Batocchio...

Blogroll Amnesty Day also requires shout-outs to Blue Gal, who's always promoting small blogs, and to the indefatigable Mike Finnigan, because at Mike's Blog Roundup, every day is Blogroll Amnesty Day.

There are many worthy blogs out there, and it's nice to step off the beaten path occasionally and read someone new. So here we go:

Confession Zero: Mark Prime's latest site for poetry is... Confession Zero.

Cheyanne's Campsite: Currently pondering Egypt and musing on Alexandria.

Drinking Liberally in New Milford: Lieberman is finally retiring – surely cause for celebratory drinking in Connecticut.

Failed Empire: Thoughts on American imperialism, and how to kick the habit.

Mikeb302000: "Guns, politics, capital punishment, movies and music."

We Are Respectable Negroes: "Happy, Non-Threatening Colored Folk... Even in the Age of Obama." Just the team to protect us from socialism!

Godless Liberal Homo: Yet again, the blog name sells itself – but if that doesn't sell ya, surely the post title "Boehner, Other Rightists, Trying to Protect the Fetuses of Child Molesters." should do the trick.

Welcome to Potterville 2: Currently considering the hypocrisy of Ayn Rand and Rand Paul... and also examining the recent State of the Union speech.

Mister Tristan: Reflections on long-distance running, culture, and current events.

Poor Impulse Control: I'm guessing from the blog title that author Tata is a fan of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, but Tata seems both nicer and more artistic than an Inuit assassin who kills with glass harpoons and has a nuke for a sidecar. But it's always the quiet ones...

Jill at "Brilliant at Breakfast"...

...
For all that I've been working 7 days a week, 12 or more hours a day since early December, I have had time to check out a few heretofore ignored or nearly-ignored blogs, which I've just added to the blogroll. I must confess that I lack Jon Swift's generosity of spirit, for what I want to see in blogrollees is not a series of posts that simply reprint, or link to, stuff that others write. I want to see WRITING. It doesn't matter if it's about politics, or pop culture, or cats. If the writing is smart, and it's entertaining, I'm there. So in celebration of Blogroll Amnesty Day, and lifting a glass high in praise for Al Weisel, who enriched the lives of so many people who didn't even know him, here are our new blogrollees:

I Was Told There Would Be Bacon (just by virtue of the title)

We Don't Agree, But... (but often we do!)

Liberal Fix (See, Dan? I'm not an ogre after all!)

My Three Cents - by fellow NJ-5 sufferer Adam L, intrepid blogger with one cute kid who somehow manages to write at every blog you can name.

ShortWoman - because we normal-size people have to stick together.

...and at the very last minute...

of mule dung and ash - today's winner of the Ornery Bastard Promising Curmudgeon award.

Cookies in Heaven by that OTHER Jill. If there are cookies in heaven, I am SO there.

Bark Bark Woof Woof...

...
So, in that tradition, I have selected five blogs that I think are worthy of attention; blogs that you may not find linked at the big places like Huffington (now a member of the AOL family) or places that get more hits on a post on a brownie recipe than they might get in a year. I chose them for my own reasons, but please feel free to add to the list via the Comments, and please take a moment to stop by and read their work.

- Cranial Hyperossification

- Fallenmonk

- Obalesque

- The Spencerian

- Why Now?

And the inimitable Blue Gal (who is -hint! hint! -- holding a fundraiser)...

...
Small and newbie bloggers please be aware of the ironclad rule that you are not allowed to make "hey no blog is as small as mine" jokes regarding Blogroll Amnesty Day. The rule is, straight from the queen of the indy blogs herself (ahem), that you are not allowed to complain or mention your blog's low traffic until you have been posting daily for a year. If you're little, link other blogs that are new or still growing their audience, and encourage them to practice their craft daily. Then, show them how.

Here are some blogs from my blogroll that have posted recently. (I haven't checked their traffic numbers because I rarely check my own). Enjoy:

Reed Writes

Earth-Bound Misfit

Hysterical Raisins

Bildungblog

Actually celebrate this dangerous, communitarian hokum.

Sad, really.

The Art and Science

of Huffington Headline-ology

The headline reads...

Tom Brokaw Speaks Out On Olbermann Exit

And the story?

Buried in the fourth paragraph (that starts with Phil Rosenthal's name being misspelled):

Rosnethal then asked Brokaw what he thought of Olbermann's exit. "You're not going to get me to go there," Brokaw said.

Nothing new here.

Just a reminder that when you dig around under the hood of the Big Shiny Expensive Elite New-Age-y Thing, don't be surprised to find that a grimy, 2-stroke lawnmower engine that runs on gossip, engineered indignation and soft-core-porn is pulling the plow.

To Your Scattered Gulfstreams Go

Arianna Huffington reports back from the Potlatch at the End of the Universe.

Bursting at the Seams

The Congress Centre, the official hub of the World Economic Forum, has been expanded and renovated, but there is still the feeling of a crowded, buzzing beehive -- especially in the main executive lounge outside the Sanada room where many of the sessions take place. Today, the lounge was so packed -- with people who instead of attending panels and speeches were schmoozing -- there wasn't a seat to be found. So, when I met up with Justin Webb and Sareen Bains, who were interviewing me for the BBC's Today show, we ended up sitting on the floor and doing the interview there. As we sat there, a constant stream of people walked by -- including Jamie Dimon and Larry Summers. I wonder if they thought I was having a 60s moment and had decided to start some sort of Davos sit-in as part of my "doing something about unemployment" drive.

Burnout, Davos-Style

As I said, getting enough sleep isn't the highest priority among Davos participants. It's partly the active, after-hours scene (many of the parties don't even start until 10 or 11), and partly the way lack of sleep has become a sort of virility symbol for many of the world's movers and shakers. In the cult of no sleep, 7 a.m. is the new 9 a.m. Despite the late nights, trying to make a breakfast appointment in Davos is an exercise in sleep deprivation one-upmanship. "Oh, hi Arianna, yeah, 8 is a bit late, but it's fine because that'll give me time to have gotten in a couple of ski runs and a conference call with Moscow first."
...

It is good to know that all the pixels that gave their digital lives to rope "Jennifer Aniston"/"bad hair"... "Lady Gaga"/"Blood & Semen"...and "Kings Of Leon"/"Homophobic"/"Glee"...into the same headlines did not live in vain.

Predicted Versus Actual

Predicted Huffpo Headline (July 08, 2010)



Actual Huffpo Headline

September 23, 2010



Rommel, you magnificent bastard

I read your book!

"Crowdsourcing"?

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

From guess where?

Crowdsource The Third World America Book Tour: Get Arianna To Come Speak To Your Group!

To coincide with the release of her new book, Third World America, Arianna will be traveling across the country talking about the steps we can all take -- as individuals, as families, and as a country -- to rebuild the middle class, restore the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living and a better life for our children, and prevent America from ever becoming a Third World nation.

Her schedule already includes stops from coast to coast, but she's left a few openings -- openings that can be filled by your group, school, organization, or town.
...

Here is a partial and cruelly-edited list of those already-scheduled stops:

• New York, NY.


• New York, NY.


• New York, NY.


• Washington, DC.


• Washington, DC.


• Detroit, MI.


• New York, NY.


• Los Angeles, CA.


• Los Angeles, CA.


• Los Angeles, CA.


• Long Beach, CA.


• New York, NY.


• New York, NY.


• New York, NY.


• Abu Dhabi, UAE.

...

Not exactly a "50 State Strategy", or breaking much of a sweat to spread the gospel among the Romans, but maybe if you ask reaaaaal nice.

When my whirlwind book tour is, um, booked, I promise to at least lightly brush up against the great, heaving, sweaty Heartland masses where the good news of Liberalism is most sorely missed.

The Riders of Lohan

"The Huffington Post" braces for Lindsay Lohan's first day in the House of Many Doors.

Most Powerful Blog In Solar System

Continues bold experiment in pauperizing writers.

“Huffington Post" is to “Writer” as…

A. “Logging” is to “Forest”
B. “Industrial Fishing” is to “Ocean”
C. “Coal Mining” is to “Appalachian Mountaintops”
D. All of the above.

The current blogosphere model of the Aggregator making a sweet living bestriding the intertoobs is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse the minute a critical mass of internet content milch cows stop giving for free.

Then things will get interesting again.

In other words...

Pay. The. Damn. Writer.

Even if it means you have to fly coach to Davos.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party was on teevee today.

Not on basic cable or Fox, but on ABC.

He sat with Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, George Will and the mortal remains of Baba Wawa.

He had to unhinge his jaw to accommodate the sheer volume of lies and wingnut twaddle he disgorged during this time on camera.

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party explained that he was not "in the business of politics".

Arianna Huffington whined to the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party that "words have consequences". The Chief Propagandist for the American Fascist Party figuratively put his cigar out in her face.

The Baltimore Beatdown -- arguably one of the most important political and cultural events in recent memory -- was glossed over for about 11 seconds.

As it was glossed over on every other network teevee show this morning.

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party opined that the Kenyan Usurper had grossly misread the 2008 elections: that the Kenyan Usurper somehow got the idea that America had given him a mandate a to ram through his Secret Commie Pinko Marxist Treehugger Agenda, whereas the real reason Americans had voted for him was that they were "tired of seeing George Bush on teevee".

Arianna Huffington whined to the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party that Glenn Beck says terrible things.

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party said that every word Glenn Beck has ever uttered (with one exception) was gold-plated awesome. That we don't want "word police". And that someone had once said something mean about the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Partyon Huffington Post, which meant that anything anyone does on the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party's teevee network had now been immunized against any such ciricism by anyone ever.

Then George Will lied for awhile about the history and meaning of the modern filibuster.

Then, for several uncomfortable hours, Baba Wawa riffled through the pages of the Scott Brown nudie "Cosmo" from the 1980s to find the the page where she -- Baba Wawa -- appeared, in order to underscore how brutally time had ravaged her.

Or something.

She did this in the interest of "full disclosure", thus prompting the only moment of genuine, bipartisan unity I have seen in a long time as the rest of the panel looked on in mute horror.

Towards the end, Arianna Huffington asked why the network run by the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party cut away from the Baltimore Beatdown.

Baba Wawa stepped in and said "We're out of time!"

She might have also flashed her tits, but by this point I was in the powder room throwing up everything I had eaten since John Anderson ran for President.

More later.

Noted Blogger Here to Beg For Handouts

Somehow, I was at the Arianna Huffington thing last night.

Rather like an alien abduction, I'm not sure exactly how it happened, or how I got there, but an hour of my life went missing and my ass hurt. (Then I apparently ended up at a bar where the President of the United States talked for awhile, after which David Fucking Brooks was all over my teevee like genital warts for no good reason.)

Ms. Huffington made it through the Chicago cold and snow all the way to the tippy top of Columbia College's 1104 S. Wabash building, where she spoke to a two-thirds-full auditorium about media, business, politics and so forth. She made a few comments (she is apparently on a never-ending hunt for “storytellers” who can turn dry data into moving, vivid prose) and then took several questions.

And based on my haunted, fragmentary recollections of the evening, I saw nothing to disabuse me of my impression that while Ms. Huffington's clothes may say "Vogue", and her vocabulary may sound like a Mario Savio mix-tape, her heart is pure J. Pierpont Morgan.

Arianna, if you want to pair your lovely rhetoric about the future of America with something tangible to help save the middle class, how about paying those “storytellers” fair market value for their labors?

Or, as Bob Heinlien once succinctly put it:

"Money is the sincerest form of flattery.
Women love to be flattered.
So do men."