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报纸研究案例集锦

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91#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-19 11:27:41 | 只看该作者
【案例】
英国星期日太阳报前景成疑

2012年05月18日16:37  新浪传媒

  新浪传媒讯:据英国《传媒周刊》报道,新闻集团旗下畅销英国小报《太阳报》于2月26日发行其周日版《星期日太阳报》。该报成为报业市场上销量最好的报纸,并被出版商誉为“30年来最重大的报纸发行”。

  报道称,该报在第一个完整的月内(即2012年3月)的平均销量高达240多万,超过其强劲对手约60万份。其第一期的广告版在宣布发行的2天内全部售完,而包括Sky、02、Weight Watchers和William Hill在内的知名品牌如今也经常出现在版面上。

  尽管如此,该小报在其创刊喜迎320万份的情况下,依然需要稳定销量。据星期五(5月11日)公布的数据显示,《星期日太阳报》是4月份整个报业中销量下滑最严重的报纸,其平均销量跌至229.7441万份,下滑5.3%。目前,其平均每周销量也已低于前新闻集团星期日小报《世界新闻报》,它2011年6月的销量为266万份;但在7月时,因电话窃听指控而关闭。

  据称,《星期日太阳报》的发行量依然是其对手《星期日镜报》的两倍还要多,其商业性也很强;《Fabulous》增刊也吸引了大量新广告商,如Aciete de Olivio、宜家Ikea、Vimto、卡森波兰PZ Cussons和CSL Sofas。

  然而,《星期日镜报》的封面标价为1英镑,是《太阳报》50便士标价的两倍。由此看来,目前这两种报纸的销量收入基本相同。一些传媒代理担心,如果《星期日太阳报》的标价上涨,其发行量可能会继续下跌。

  新闻国际的常务董事保罗-海耶斯(Paul Hayes)表示,“10个星期以来,《星期日太阳报》一直都很成功,读者和广告商也很支持这份星期日版报纸。在某些情况下,我们还看到广告商正在增加《Fabulous》杂志上的同比预算。”他说,“我们真正提出了发行7天的提议,与以往相比,这将为广告商提供更多的具有创造性的机会和弹性。”

  根据对《太阳报》预计7天总发行量(1530万份)的《星期日太阳报》读者群的调查研究(2012年4月,IPSOS媒体),13%的读者只阅读星期日版,这一数字大约是200万成年人。深入研究其读者群还会发现,与星期一至星期六版相比,星期日版则吸引了更多女性读者(49%比42%);星期日版读者观众也更加倾向于年轻人(43%比35%)。而每份报纸的平均读者数量也更多,这也反映了高兴趣水平。
                                                     (斯年)

http://news.sina.com.cn/m/2012-05-18/163724439169.shtml
92#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-24 00:52:34 | 只看该作者
【案例】
中国报业发展概况
中国国情-中国网
时间: 2011-06-29  
崔保国 任姣洁

2010年,中国报业最值得注目的事情是报业广告出现了近年来难得一见的高增长,各种数据显示报业广告增长率接近19%,甚至超过电视广告收入和整体广告市场的增长率。虽然报业广告市场还处于全球金融危机后的恢复性增长,但其发展仍令人不可思议。同时,新媒体的异军突起,尤其是微博、智能手机、平板电脑、阅读终端等的出现,在大大拓展新闻的传播形式与时效的同时也给中国报业发展带来了巨大的挑战,可以预见,这种挑战将会成为一种长期威胁。

2010年是中国报刊体制深化改革的一年,中国报业内部的产业规模与竞争格局仍然维持相对稳定的状态,但报业在应对新媒体冲击时作出的一系列应对举措,为报业未来发展注入了新的活力。

一 2010年中国报业的产业规模

2010年,中国报业广告市场赢得了近年来难得一见的高增长,且出现了报业广告跑赢整体广告市场的现象。CTR提供的数据显示,2010年报纸广告刊登额增长率为18?9%,显著高于2009年同期的6?2%,也高于同期广告市场整体和电视广告的增长率。如此高的报业广告增长是始料未及的,表明报业广告市场已基本摆脱了金融危机的影响。当然,2010年全国各区域的报业市场发展也不平衡,南方城市普遍较好,北京等北方城市的情况并不乐观。

在新媒体带来的竞争日益激烈的今天,上述增长态势对中国报业而言相当可观。但是仔细分析每月情况发现,前四月增长显著,使上半年增长率达21.9%。但从5月开始增长速度减缓,只有11月、12月恢复到20%的水平。由此可见,2010年上半年的高增长率是基于2009年同期受全球金融危机影响导致基数较低的恢复性增长,而第四季度的增长得益于房地产、零售业的拉动作用。。随着房地产广告在广告市场的低迷及汽车广告、医疗保健广告的增长趋缓,2011年报业广告的增长态势不容乐观。

在报纸广告领域,房地产业、汽车业和商业零售业是其中的支柱行业,CTR的数据显示,在2010年报纸广告收入中,这三大行业所占比重达54.4%,前六个行业的集中度达69%,而2009年的数据分别为53.2%和68.3%。2010年对报纸广告贡献最大的是零售业,同比广告增长32.9%,贡献率达27.5%;其次是汽车行业,同比广告增长38.8%,贡献率达20%。究其原因,全球金融危机后的行业复苏与规模发展带来了这两个行业的高增长,使其成为报业广告的主要贡献者。而作为报纸第一大广告支柱的房地产行业,由于受到2010年国家出台的房地产宏观调控政策影响,其广告在2010年只增长了7.7%,对报业广告的贡献率也只有12.6%。此外,娱乐及休闲、医疗保健、家用电器也是2010年报纸广告的主要贡献者,但其贡献率远低于2009年的水平。

在报纸发行领域,据世界报业与新闻工作者协会2010年8月在巴黎发布的信息,“2010年全球日报发行量前100名排行榜”中,中国26家报纸(其中大陆25家、台湾1家)进入百强行列,连续第五年占据榜单的1/4强,在世界付费日报前百名排行榜中仍处于第一的位置。

在报纸零售领域,世纪华文对全国42个大中小型城市的报纸发行监测数据显示,2010年中国报纸零售发行市场中,都市综合类日报仍然高居榜首,市场份额达到64.7%,同比高出4.5个百分点。生活服务类报纸的市场份额从2009年的第三位上升至2010年的第二位,同比增长3.3个百分点。时政类报纸市场份额同比降低了5.2个百分点,从第二位跌至第三位。此外,财经类报纸与IT类报纸2010年的市场份额均有所下降。

二 中国报业的产业规模

根据新闻出版总署公布的统计数据,2009年我国报纸定价总金额为351.7亿元,报纸出版(包括相关广告业务)总产出为646.0亿元,实现增加值280.4亿元,营业收入627.6亿元,利润(结余)总额70.4亿元。

在报纸出版领域,2009年我国共出版报纸1937种,均低于2006、2007、2008年三年的数量,同比下降0.31%。

虽然新闻出版总署还未公布2010年中国报纸出版种数数据,但有一个值得注意的信息:2010年4月全国报刊退出机制试点经验交流会在辽宁举行,会议的重点是在全国启动报刊退出机制。2010年7月,新闻出版总署印发了《报刊出版综合质量评估实施办法(试行)》,要求报刊每三年实行一次末位淘汰,退出比例不低于本区域(省区市)报刊总数的3%。由此可以预见,2010年及以后我国报纸出版种数将继续保持下降的趋势。

在报纸出版结构方面,2009年与2008年的情况基本相当,并未发生太大变化。

在报纸印数方面,2009年报纸平均期印数20837.15万份,报纸出版总印数为439.11亿份,总印张增加到1969.4亿印张。报纸总印数相比2008年有所减少。虽然目前还无法获得2010年报纸印数、出版结构等数据,但2009年下半年,国内新闻纸主导价格为3950元/吨,2010年一季度上调为4400元/吨,而从4月开始,市场价格已分批分区域上涨至4700元,有些甚至已上调至5000元/吨,这必将使得各家报社的成本支出明显上升。从正常发展趋势来看,2010年的报纸印数也将会受新闻纸价格及行业政策等因素影响而减少。

在报纸分布领域,2009年省级报纸虽然在出版种数方面略低于地市级报纸,但报纸总印数仍占全国的54%,依然稳坐全国报业第一的位置。地市级报纸出版种数位居第一,占全国的44.97%,但是报纸总印数较低,占全国的31.16%。排在其后的是全国性报纸,出版种数为225种,总印数为63.86亿份。
三 报业集团上市情况

目前,我国上市的报业企业主要有新华传媒(600825,上海交易所)、博瑞传播(600880,上海交易所)、北青传媒(01000,HK)、粤传媒(002181,深圳交易所)、赛迪传媒(000504,深圳交易所)和华闻传媒(000793,深圳交易所)。这六家报业上市公司2010年经营具体情况。

报业主要上市公司的营业收入并不高,利润率也不乐观。

我国上市的报业集团采取将公司的经营资产剥离上市的方式,为确保国家意识形态的安全,采编业务——新闻内容并不允许作为资本交易的对象。而对传媒业而言,内容产业才是其核心价值之所在。将核心部分切分后,“把它们叫做报业公司,不如把它们称呼为拥有平面媒体的广告公司更准确些”。

这种“两分开”的运作模式,与现代企业制度及上市公司制度存在很多差异,从而导致传媒企业价值链的人为割裂,以及媒体资产在市场上自由交易的制度欠缺。此外,还致使交易价格无法明晰计算,相应的评估手段缺失等。与其他行业的上市公司相比,上市报业集团不仅经营绩效偏低,而且还出现了公司治理结构不完善、关联交易问题频繁等诸多弊端。

此外,我国传媒业的区域和行业分割严重制约了传媒上市公司的快速发展,使得传媒上市公司跨区域跨行业的收购兼并困难,尤其是报业传媒公司受到的制约最大。

新华传媒在2010年上半年营业收入同比下降8.1%,净利润同比下降11.2%,报纸发行广告业务收入下降12.2%,毛利率下降1%,公司营业利润同比下降19%,公司业绩下降幅度为11%。赛迪传媒境内上市连续三年出现亏损,已沦为*ST股。相比而言,营业收入同比增长较高的华闻传媒,采用的是多元化经营发展策略;博瑞传媒的经营领域不仅涉及报刊,还涉足广电和网络游戏领域。可以看出,报业上市公司为了快速成长,已开始努力拓展成长空间,朝着多元化经营方向发展。

四 报业的数字化转型

报业数字化转型是各大报纸的经营主题。随着手机微博等网络新媒体展现出越发强劲的传播态势,报纸等传统媒体开始借助网络等新媒体力量为未来发展谋篇布局,以此拓展自己的成长空间。

2010年,报网融合态势得到进一步加强,很多报纸开始迈出实质性的步伐。

7月,羊城晚报报业集团推出了网络版《羊城晚报》。与电子版的最大区别是,网络版是即时更新的,主要发布羊城晚报记者采写的尚未见报的动态消息。

10月,《齐鲁晚报》表示,《齐鲁晚报》将借鉴新的传播方式,做自己的网站,尝试全媒体。

《扬子晚报》在2009年6月率先推出了“扬子招考飞信”,以移动飞信的免费短信方式,向考生和家长第一时间发布录取分数线、各校投档线、平行志愿的征求等重要信息,订户突破了10万人。

文汇新民联合报业集团对集团旗下18家媒体的新闻信息资源进行了统一整合,建立了集文字、图像、音视频为一体的立体传播体系,传播终端包括个人电脑、手机、电子阅读器、户外传媒、电信呼叫等形式。

浙江日报报业集团2009年9月组建了主营户外LED电子显示屏的浙江竞合传媒有限公司。截至目前,浙江竞合传媒有限公司投入运营的LED总屏数达26块。

黑龙江日报报业集团于2010年5月31日启动报业多通道跨地域新闻制作共享平台。作为生活报传媒集团地方版,齐齐哈尔等八家地市报社和有关晚报加入该平台。通过即时、互动的传输功能,打破各报社的信息壁垒,实现信息资源共享,降低了各报的采编成本,实现了新闻“一次制作、多次传播”。

此外,以解放日报报业集团为代表的报业单位专门针对iPhone,开发了在线新闻应用,取名为“解放新新闻”;湖北日报传媒集团与汉王合作力推数字阅读;《人民日报》、《中国日报》、《南方周末》、《新京报》等针对苹果公司发布的平板电脑iPad,开发了客户端阅读软件,使用户能更加方便及时地获取新闻信息。

2010年,随着3D电影《阿凡达》的热映,通过图片呈现立体效果的3D报纸开始出现。继比利时《最后一点钟报》推出了世界上第一份3D报纸后,我国《十堰晚报》、《齐鲁晚报》、《南方都市报》等也相继推出3D报刊,掀起了2010年出版3D报纸的浪潮。

中国广告协会报刊委员会主任梁勤俭认为,3D报刊的特点是有内容、有广告、有创意、有突破,传递给受众的信息也比平面媒体更立体、更直观、更丰富。正是这种新颖的视觉感官体验和立体的表现效果,使得读者不再单凭自己的好恶蜻蜓点水似地翻阅报纸,而是主动去品味,阅读时间延长,从而提升了新闻与广告的传播效果。

当然,3D报刊的推出,带来了报纸制作成本的上涨,比如眼镜费用、纸张费用、技术研发成本等。而且3D图片的制作时间较长,会延误报纸新闻的时效性,暂时还很难满足日报的图片需求。此外,读者阅读3D报纸时需要佩戴眼镜很不方便舒适,3D报纸在发行等方面也存在一些困难。因此,3D报纸是否会成为报业未来发展的新方向,还有待时间和市场的考验。

五 展望中国报业的2011

2011年报业发展的趋势取决于以下几个关键因素:一是宏观经济的发展趋势;二是报业改革的进程时间表;三是报业广告的重点行业的景气情况;四是新媒体的增长情况和报业数字化转型的进程。对于不同区域来说,还取决于区域和城市的广告趋势以及报纸、电视与新媒体的竞争态势。

2011年是“十二五”的第一年,中央已经发布了关于制定“十二五”规划的建议。中央正式提出把文化产业作为国民支柱产业来发展,这对报业来说应该是利好消息。因此,“十二五”期间传媒业将会进入一个快速发展的时期。

关于报业改革的进程,新闻出版总署主管报刊的副署长李东东在考察天津新闻出版情况时强调:“作为文化体制改革的重要组成部分,新闻出版体制改革一直走在文化体制改革的前列。现在,出版社改革即将完成,报刊改革进展顺利,目前全国已有1069家报刊出版单位转制或登记为企业法人单位。下一步要通过进一步深化报刊改革,推动报刊结构调整,治散治滥,优化资源配置,转变发展模式,实现集团化、集约化发展。”李东东还说,在指导非时政类报刊转企改制过程中,要积极推进中央和省级党报党刊所属报刊、党政机关所属报刊、企业主办和参与主办的报刊等先行改革;时政类报刊则要继续推进宣传、经营业务“两分开”。

2011年1月11日,在北京召开的全国新闻出版工作会议上,新闻出版总署署长柳斌杰表示:“要深入推进报刊出版单位分类改革工作。除党报党刊等时政类报刊出版单位按照事业单位的部署进行改革以外,其他具有独立法人资格的非时政类报刊出版单位,一律在2012年上半年前完成或基本完成转企改制任务。同时,要加快推动完成转制后的出版单位深化改革。已完成转制的新闻出版企业要及时完善法人治理结构,建立现代企业制度,有条件的要进行公司制或股份制改造。打造一批世界知名的国家级骨干出版传媒企业、印刷复制企业和发行物流集团,加快新闻出版资源向优势企业集聚,建设国家出版传媒主力‘舰队’。”

从宏观形势看,经济发展的增长趋势还会继续保持。在维持稳定的大主题下,新闻报刊业的改革进程不可期待进程太快。而新媒体的快速发展、传媒环境的变化对报业的影响也是一个长期的过程,从近几年的状况看,这不会是一个激变的过程,而是一个渐变的过程。2011年这一过程仍将继续,报业目前处在一个相对稳定的时期,至少在3~5年内报业发展还不会出现急剧下滑的现象,但报业要保持2010年的高增长趋势也将会很艰难。

http://www.china.com.cn/guoqing/2011-06/29/content_23838054.htm
93#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-24 09:57:43 | 只看该作者
【案例】
美国多家报纸打造全媒体传播经营体系

2012年05月22日15:01  新华网

  自2008年以来,受新媒体和金融危机的冲击,美国多家闻名于世的百年大报停刊转型。2009年3月,有146年历史的《西雅图邮报》成为美国首家只出网络版的大报,一个月后,百年名报《基督教科学箴言报》也正式停止日报印刷,转而改为在线新闻。华尔街的一名评论员说:

  "纸媒被网络等新媒体逼得走投无路,有点像母亲好不容易把孩子生下来,却反被孩子给掐死了!"

  实际上,传统媒体并没有完全走入绝境,只是面临新的挑战。多数传统媒体都在积极转型,以求适应新趋势,从而在新媒体时代"突围"。美联社、《华尔街日报》、《纽约时报》等媒体都在打造多媒体、全媒体的传播、经营和事业发展体系。

  美联社认为,"内容为王"仍是媒体行业的普遍法则,新媒体仍需要通讯社的服务。过去几年,美联社在新媒体领域频频出招。先是建立数字合作社,实现内容整合,为美联社新闻寻找新的数字出版终端和收入源。其做法是把会员报刊的新闻信息内容加以整合,制作出灵活多样的新闻内容便于不同平台使用。这一战略的第一个产品就是移动新闻网。这是一个针对智能手机提供多媒体新闻信息产品的网络平台,它把美联社的国内国际重大新闻与会员报刊的地方新闻相结合,用户可通过移动终端随时随地进入平台获取新闻。

  为解决网络上的版权保护难题,美联社还推出新闻Registry平台。利用这个技术平台,美联社可对其所有新闻内容设置标签和版权信息,并能对互联网上所有使用其新闻的行为进行跟踪。任何第三方或用户均可通过新型数字平台和设备找到并使用美联社的新闻内容,同时,内容提供商可以从中获知哪些新闻受到读者热捧,并根据用户的喜好来研发新产品,开发收入源。

  《华尔街日报》是美国发行量最大的付费财经报纸,2007年6月被新闻集团收购。新闻集团下属的道琼斯公司前首席执行官欣顿曾对媒体说,《华尔街日报》的梦想就是要做到内容收费,而且每个平台上都要收费。如今,这一梦想已基本实现:纸质报纸、网络版、新媒体iPad版本以及专属的金融终端,每一个平台都是利润来源。

  《纽约时报》去年年初开始在其网站使用计量收费系统,这个系统允许读者每月浏览一定数量的新闻,超量阅读则需收费。这种计量系统设计目的在于用免费文章吸引读者,读者想要获取更多内容时按量收费。

  此外,《纽约时报》、《华盛顿邮报》等多家媒体去年1月初还集体融资支持一家名为Ongo的公司推出个人订制新闻服务,尝试推行读者付费浏览网络新闻模式,读者每月订阅价格约为7美元。其基本订阅计划包括美联社、《华盛顿邮报》和《今日美国报》的文章,以及《纽约时报》和《金融时报》的部分内容。用户还可以增订《卫报》等媒体的新闻,每增加一处新闻来源需多支付99美分。

http://news.sina.com.cn/m/2012-05-22/150124458080.shtml
94#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-26 09:59:37 | 只看该作者
【案例】
深圳特区报今迎30周岁生日

2012年05月24日10:09  深圳新闻网

  30年前的今天是深圳特区报创刊的日子。昨天晚上,主题为"特立三十载,报春第一枝"的深圳特区报报庆30周年答谢晚宴在大中华喜来登举行。市几套班子领导、市老领导、社会各界的嘉宾、通讯员代表、读者代表等600余人和深圳报业集团员工共同参加了特报的"生日派对"。

  深圳报业集团党组书记、社长黄扬略在致辞中说,深圳特区报有幸生在一个以改革为使命的城市,30年来勇立改革的潮头,传播春天的信息,忠实记录着一座城市的历史。在深圳特区报的发展历史上,得到了深圳市委市政府的大力支持,深圳特区报一代又一代的报人传承、坚守、付出,不断开拓创新,才有今天的成绩。他希望深圳特区报在未来的日子里,要继续担当深圳报业集团的领头羊,带头尝试、探索、实践"一报一网"、"报网联动"、"报网融合",从传统媒体向现代的全媒体飞跃。

  深圳报业集团副总编辑、深圳特区报总编辑陈寅在致辞中感谢30年来中央、广东省以及深圳历届市委市政府对深圳特区报的亲切关怀和大力支持。他表示,当前,报纸面对的媒体竞争格局正在发生深刻的变化,深圳特区报将继续坚持"报道改革强音,传播权威资讯",紧紧围绕党和政府的中心工作,服务改革开放和科学发展大局;坚持"新闻立报、文化强报、服务兴报、品牌盛报",着力"办一份有强大传播力的新型城市党报",打造一流现代传媒;坚持改革创新,以报网融合与一体化为抓手,全面推进报社各项事业的发展。

  市委副秘书长胡谋在致辞中向深圳特区报创刊30周年表示热烈的祝贺,并寄望深圳特区报继续为时代立言、为时代立心、为改革呐喊,在新的媒体格局中继续敢闯敢试,不断提升创新能力与开拓能力,全力打造一流现代传媒,争当中国传媒的领头羊。

  "特报公益慈善基金"启动仪式也在昨晚的"生日派对上"举行,著名导演陆川等知名人士被聘请为首批传播大使。据了解,"特报公益慈善基金"成立最主要职责之一,是发起和组织深圳首届"公益金百万行"活动。该活动将于7月8日在深圳湾畔起步,深圳市民将通过健康步行的方式,募集公益善款,用于各类公益慈善活动。据市关爱办负责人介绍,"公益金百万行"活动以后每年举办一届,力争打造成为深圳最有影响力的全民参与的公益慈善活动之一。

http://news.sina.com.cn/m/2012-05-24/100924470893.shtml
95#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-27 00:48:54 | 只看该作者
【案例】
惰性文化尝苦果——以传统报业的衰落为例
原作者: 范东升|来自: 《 人民论坛 》(2012年第15期)|  


被调查的报人几乎一致承认,报社内部存在两种势力的冲突:一些人主张加速数字化的转型,另一些“在血液里浸透着油墨”的人则固持报纸传统理念和运作方式
范东升

阻碍报业创新的“惰性”文化

从全球范围来看,传统报业的衰落已经是不争的事实。

报业曾是人类历史上第一种居统治地位的大众传播媒介。自广播电视相继问世之后,报纸的垄断地位已被打破。据美国报纸的统计数据显示,从20世纪80年代后期,报业发行总量已开始走向下行道。而从20世纪90年代中期之后,互联网和各种新媒体的发展群雄并起,世界传媒生态环境发生巨变,传统报业走向衰落的过程大大加速。

自2008年年初起,在有世界报业帝国之称的北美和欧洲,在长达四年的时间里,传统报业遭受重创,数百家报社倒闭,许多报业集团陷入经营困境,数以万计的报业从业人员失去工作。拙著《拯救报纸》一书中列举了大量资料数据,描述了这次报业危机的惨景。令人沮丧的是,直到今天,美欧报业总体上仍无起色,西方的媒体同行们还在晦暗不明的处境中艰难地探索。美国报业的总体广告收入连年下跌,2011年纸媒广告收入总额只有207亿美元,略高于1951年的195亿,即倒退到60年前的水平。 另一方面,从传媒转型的标志看,一些重要指标已达到临界点:据国外知名的市场研究机构eMarketer的预测,2012年美国网络广告额将第一次超过纸媒广告;在iPad上市不到两年的短暂时间内,美国使用iPad等数字终端的用户在成年人中已占29%,使用iPhone等智能手机的已达到48%。而在平板电脑和智能手机上使用的媒体应用程序(apps)等数字产品,在形态和质量上大步跃进,所创造的多媒体用户体验远胜于纸媒。

美国皮尤研究所对分属6家报业集团的38家报社进行调查,提出一份最新研究报告。该报告对5年后美国报业前景的描绘是相当黯淡的:一些日报只能改为每周2—3次出版甚至改为周报;报社将进一步裁减采编人员;一些报纸将不得不停业关闭。

在这份以探索报业经营模式创新为主题的报告中,给我印象最深的一项结论是: 报业数字化转型的最大难点与障碍,并不在如何创新营收方式,而在于传统报业普遍存在因循守旧、畏惧变革的企业文化。被调查的报界人士坦率地承认,在报社存在一种阻碍创新的“惰性”文化。虽然互联网带来的数字化技术变革已有15年,但是报社出版人仍然不知道如何着手实行转变。许多报界人士明白开拓新媒体有利于报业未来的生存,但却强调“我们今天还要吃饭”。他们一方面承认报业已经面临被淘汰出局的危险,另一方面又认为“创新模式”的成功几率只有10%,担心为着10%的成功率去冒险,90%会加速企业的衰亡。

被调查的报人几乎一致承认,报社内部存在两种势力的冲突:一些人主张加速数字化的转型,另一些“在血液里浸透着油墨”的人则固持报纸传统理念和运作方式,他们倾向于否认报业面临衰败的严重形势。一位被调查的报社负责人说,你可以换掉报社的领导人,可以随意挥动指挥棒,但结果是,你的队伍还是按兵不动。“最大的困难就是试图去改变”。报社不乏传统型的操作人才,却缺乏甚至流失掉懂得新媒体的创新性人才。一位管理者说,“了解新媒体环境和知道怎样采取措施去适应它,这是非常不同的两回事”。企业的惰性文化导致发展停滞,这份报告指出, 柯达公司不幸破产的结局就是前车之鉴。

报业并非未曾得到过历史机遇的青睐

实际上,报业并非未曾得到过历史机遇的青睐。

在20世纪90年代初,美国报业比很多其他行业的大公司和政府部门捷足先登,首先试水互联网。全美发行量最大的报纸《今日美国》,以及《波士顿环球报》、《纽约时报》、《华盛顿邮报》、《洛杉矶时报》等其他主要报纸的网站,先后在1995年和1996年创办。 据美国报纸协会2002年的调查,在提供地方新闻和信息方面,美国报纸网站超过雅虎等网站成为第一来源。

在利用互联网方面, 报业具有财力、人才、技术、信息资源等多方面的明显优势,而初出茅庐的互联网行业本身也是在传统媒体密切关注乃至推波助澜之下才逐渐发展壮大起来的。按理说,报业本应引领媒体技术变革潮头并大有可为,但事实上,在随后十多年的时间里,报业却坐失良机,形势发展完全出人意外。

在这个十分短暂的时期内,数字化信息传播技术革命改变了世界:从Yahoo到Google ,从Blogger到Youtube,从Facebook到Twitter , 从kindle 到iPad,人类社会闻所未闻的新型传媒形态和平台横空出世,令人目不暇接,传统媒体所依存的受众与广告市场都发生了根本变化。但以传媒霸主地位自居的美国报业集团,却在新媒体技术变革面前应对迟缓,几乎虚度了十年光阴。眼看着一个个稚嫩的竞争对手在短短几年之内便从无到有,从小到大,并取得压倒性的优势产业地位,夺走了越来越大的市场份额,传统报业反而日益陷入经营困境不能自拔。

导致今天如此被动局面的重要原因,就是报业内部普遍存在阻碍和抵制创新的“惰性”文化。

美国新闻研究所2006年提出的《下一代报纸》研究报告中已经指出,传统报业由于自身形态、功能、历史和在社会中的地位以及固定的生产程序,产生了一种“障眼物”,使它们很难理解正在发生的根本性变化。在不到一代人之前,报纸还是最高水平的信息载体,也是唯一最广泛的引导公众的信息提供者。这种垄断地位十多年前已经动摇,但是报业仍然有一种自己是不可缺少的“主流媒体”的虚幻感。

哈佛商学院教授克里斯坦森根据产业史的研究指出,很多传统企业对于新技术应对迟缓或失误,并不是由于不够明智和头脑固执,而恰恰是由于他们囿于以往成功的经验和由此形成的行为习惯。那些企业通常会犯两个错误:一是不能调整资源配置去探索新技术发展的可能性;二是在投入资源制作新产品时,太像旧产品的生产模式。

而大多数的报纸正是跌入同样的陷阱,即只是把网站和其他新媒体平台看作是纸媒内容的机械延伸和某种附加的发布渠道,忽视了自身组织结构、经营理念、编辑方针和赢利方式的创新,不懂得利用网络和新媒体进行“潜在客户资料采集”、目标性直接营销等 ,也始终严重轻视搜索、博客、微博、社交网络、移动网络等一系列新媒体形式和新信息平台具有的巨大社会影响力和提供的市场机会。大多数报纸忽略了并不经常阅读报纸新闻的公众的巨大需求,也没有认识到公众现在已经具备了创造、上载、共享大量信息的能力。

由于这种盲目自满的惰性文化的困扰,报业不仅无法吸纳新媒体技术精英,反而不断流失有创新意识与能力的人才。时至今日,在全世界的报业集团中,对新技术研发方面普遍存在恐惧心理,即使偶有尝试也难以持久,鲜见成效。

报业存在惰性文化的一个客观原因是,无论在中国还是外国,报纸多年来一向被看作是收益稳固和高利润的行业,是可以源源不断挤出现金的“金牛”。在报业危机之前,美国上市报业集团的平均利润是20%,而在财富杂志评出的500强企业中,平均利润只有11%。 然而从世界范围来看,过去的这种美好时光已经一去不复返。

在惰性文化的宿命中沉沦,还是在危机警示中奋起

由于东西方报业发展阶段不同,国内报业还有一定的发展余地和宝贵的上升空间,但美欧报业的衰落也令人明显感到阵阵寒意。虽然中国经济的持续高速增长,仍在不断推升中国报业的广告收益,但是与美国同行一样, 新一代年轻读者群的集体流失,是中国报业无法回避的、最大的潜在危机。

中国报界读懂美国报业“十年蹉跎”的历史教训了吗?中国报人是将在惰性文化的宿命中沉沦,还是在危机警示中奋起,拒绝重蹈他人覆辙,决然改变自身,走上创新转型之路?

笔者曾在新浪微博上说过, 就我个人的经验,纸媒转型之难,难在有权者无识,有识者无权,有识有权者无钱,有识有权有钱者无可用之人。这里再加上一句,即使以上数者兼备,还要有创业者敢担风险的勇气。

未来的五到十年是世界报业进一步发生根本转变的时期,中国报业能否抓住这最后的历史机会,焕发活力,顺利转型,人们将拭目以待。

(作者为汕头大学长江新闻与传播学院代院长,教授) 

http://paper.people.com.cn/rmlt/ ... _1057266.htm?div=-1
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 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-27 10:33:36 | 只看该作者
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李星文美国2012年发行量最大的三份报纸:华尔街日报211.8万份,今日美国181.7万份,纽约时报158.6万份。其余报纸都在百万份之内。它这前三名的发行量还赶不上参考消息,环球时报和人民日报吧。
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 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-28 20:11:23 | 只看该作者
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mediaview看完,觉得跟老罗的牛博网发展历程有点相似,只是后者还在发育时就被阉了。
@媒介评弹【美国《哥伦比亚新闻学评论》封面解析互联网第一报】创办几年拿下普利策,CJR杂志封面文章全面解析赫芬顿邮报的背后,标题“六度聚合”源自六度空间理论,即“最多通过六个人你就能够认识地球上任何一个陌生人”,去年网聚5400万评论即是一例。http://t.cn/zOHKuUb
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Cover Story — May / June 2012 Six degrees of aggregation
How The Huffington Post ate the Internet
TAGS: Arianna Huffington, David Wood, Jonah Peretti, Ken Lerer, Paul Berry, Pulitzer Prize, The Huffington Post
Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up.
The invitation for the lunch came from Kenneth Lerer. He was 51 and casting about for something new, having recently left his position as executive vice president for communications at AOL. Lerer was a private man who was nonetheless comfortable in the presence of powerful people with whom he had earned a reputation for honing images in disrepair, most famously for the disgraced and subsequently rehabilitated junk bond trader Michael Milken. Lerer had made a good deal of money and a good many friends after having first made a name for himself in the quixotic 1974 New York senate campaign of Ramsey Clark (for which he was hired by the chairman of this magazine, Victor Navasky, who later recruited him for CJR’s Board of Overseers, which has no say in content). Lerer was splitting his time between New York and skiing at his vacation home in Utah when he came across a new book by a young sociologist, Duncan Watts. The book was called Six Degrees. Lerer was so taken by it that he took Watts to lunch.
He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. Lerer had a plan and he wanted Watts to help him. He had set himself an ambitious target. He wanted to take on the National Rifle Association.
He told Watts: “I know the answer to this is somewhere in these pages.”
Nine years and one Pulitzer Prize later, what is the phenomenon that lunch set in motion? How is it that The Huffington Post, at turns celebrated as the savior of its parent company and decried as a glitzy thief of journalism produced by others, has come to matter?


Before its purchase by AOL in February 2011, HuffPost was not a property that had produced much in the way of revenue; it had posted a profit only in the year before the sale—the amount has never been disclosed—on a modest $30 million in revenue. Aside from scoops from its estimable Washington bureau, it did little in the way of breaking stories, the industry’s traditional pathway to recognition.
Huffington Post, which had mastered search-engine optimization and was quick to understand and pounce on the rise of social media, had been at once widely followed but not nearly so widely cited. But that is likely to change now that it can boast of a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting—the rebuttal to every critic who dismissed HuffPost as an abasement to all that was journalistically sacred.
Arianna Huffington liked to boast that the site that bore her name had remained true to its origins. The homepage’s “splash” headline still reflected a left-of-center perspective; it had thousands of bloggers, famous and not, none of them paid; and while there was ever more original content, especially on the politics and business pages, the site was populated overwhelmingly with content that had originated elsewhere, much of it from the wires (in fairness, an approach long practiced by many of the nation’s newspapers). But Huffington Post had evolved into something more than the Web’s beast of traffic, blogging, and aggregation. These days, Arianna Huffington has a regular seat at the politics roundtable, which speaks not only to her own facility on TV but also to the prominence her organization enjoys.
Power can be felt, even if it defies measurement. By the winter of 2012, Huffington Post could lay claim to a widely shared perception of its growing influence—the word Huffington prefers to power, which, she says, sounds “too loaded.” For better or, in the eyes of its critics, worse, Huffington Post had assumed the position of a media institution of consequence.
It was possible to draw all sorts of conclusions from data about “HuffPo,” both flattering and not. Yet two numbers in particular stood out for what they suggested about the nature of the enterprise that Huffington, Jonah Peretti, and the host of that first lunch, Ken Lerer, had built: 40 million and 19,000. The former is the number of unique visitors who came to the site in January. The latter is the number of names in Arianna Huffington’s contact list.
Each represents a network that together constituted something far greater than what each represented by itself—an aspiration: the potential power that comes to those who can build, nurture, and harness a network that is at once vast and loyal.
Emphasis on potential.
1. Connected
Duncan Watts, an Australian who had come to Cornell for graduate school, was 32 and possessed a disposition that could be mistaken for curmudgeonly. The rapid growth of the Web had proven a boom time for social scientists, who could suddenly perform all sorts of research on large samples in very quick time and at relatively little cost. The result was papers and conferences and books that, in Watts’ view, transformed sociologists into engineers. Time and again, people approached Watts with questions for which he could offer only the maddening answer of “it depends.” This did nothing to make sociologists popular. Nor did it stop all sorts of people from coming around, among them Ken Lerer.
Six Degrees examined the nature of what Watts called “small worlds.” The conceit—later to be adopted by fans of Kevin Bacon and playwright John Guare—had come from a 1967 experiment by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which he tracked the number of connections it would take for a letter to reach a certain recipient unknown to the original sender. The answer: six. That conclusion suggested that it was possible for any one person to reach any other person in the world by establishing a network of diminishing familiarity—start with a friend, then a friend of a friend, and so on—until the connection was complete. That premise had fueled the study of what Watts called the “science of networks,” one that dated to the 18th century and which had over time drawn in a host of scientists who seemed to think all things could be measured. And if they could be measured, they might be graphed and charted in a way that revealed patterns that could, in an ideal world, be replicated.
Perhaps the dream of creating vast networks of connected strangers was possible, if only one could identify the proper links. Or, in the parlance of the network world, making weak links into strong ones.
Watts’s book was filled with images and drawings that could be confounding—how many threads are necessary for connecting a mass of buttons in a way that created a button network?—yet tantalizing, especially, it seemed, for someone trying to find a way to take on one of the nation’s most powerful lobbies.
Still, networks were eternally undermined by the inevitable force of randomness. It was one thing, say, to go to a baseball game and hear the stirrings of rhythmic clapping that then cascade around the ballpark so that quickly everyone is clapping in unison. A powerful thing to behold—so much so that an inning later, you yourself might want to start the whole stadium clapping. Maybe the person to your left joins in, and maybe five or six others do, too. Until the clapping dies. In Watts’s view, networks were a wonderful phenomenon to observe, but all but impossible to replicate. Why did everyone in the ballpark feel the desire to join in the clapping in the sixth inning but not in the seventh? What was different? Could you somehow recreate the precise conditions that made that ephemeral but resoundingly successful sixth-inning network happen?
Watts doubted it. There were simply too many variables at work. Still, you could, in theory, try something: Start to clap, see if anyone joins in, stop if they don’t, wait for a new set of conditions to arise—another player to bat, a runner reaches second base? Or third? In other words, experiment, and measure the results as they occur, all the while adjusting, tweaking—try clapping louder, say, then faster, maybe adding a chant—but do so having accepted the likelihood that animates work for all scientists: failure.
Ken Lerer listened, and he was not deterred. Networks did, in fact, occur—vast networks through which previously disconnected people suddenly found themselves joined together, perhaps to share an idea, a song, a sentiment, a cause. Why not then try to create a network that could challenge the vast and powerful and sustaining network of the NRA?
“I know the answers,” Watts told him. “I am confident they are not there.” Then, having deflated Lerer, Watts threw him a lifeline: “Maybe my friend Jonah can help you.”

Jonah Peretti was 29 and had already earned a reputation as something of a wise guy. He had been a technology teacher at a New Orleans private school when he was admitted to a graduate program at MIT. His plan was to study ways networks might foster communication among teachers, but got sidetracked midway through his master’s thesis. In 2000, Nike was inviting customers to create footwear with personalized wording. The company had been criticized widely for selling sneakers made by desperately poor people in impoverished countries. Peretti, tall, skinny and bespectacled, submitted his request: He wanted his sneakers emblazoned with the word SWEATSHOP. Nike declined. At which point, Peretti did a clever thing: he e-mailed.
Nike replied. Back and forth they went: Peretti pressing his request; Nike, grasping at excuses, going so far as to refuse on the grounds that “sweatshop” was slang and therefore not permissible. Peretti, citing Webster’s, insisted it was not. He ended the exchange with a final request: “Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?” What happened next represents one of those moments in which the tectonic media plates experienced a subtle but profound shift: Peretti offered the e-mail trail to Harper’s. The magazine declined. So, on January 17, 2001, Peretti forwarded the e-mails to 10 friends. Those friends, in turn, forwarded the e-mails to other friends and before long, a lot people who had never heard of Jonah Peretti—some of them in Australia—were sending around his e-mail conversations with Nike.
Less than two weeks after he first forwarded the e-mails, the San Jose Mercury News published a story about the exchange. Salon soon followed. Then Time, The Village Voice, and The Independent and The Guardian in London. Years later, Peretti would recall the sensation of watching something he had originated spread so widely that it would culminate in his appearance on the Today Show with a chagrined representative of Nike. “Every person who’s made something that’s gone viral remembers the experience with glee and disbelief,” he says. “Part of it feels powerful and part of it feels like magic—I just did this little thing and a big thing happened.”
To his credit, Peretti completed his thesis on teacher communication, but his mind was elsewhere, looking for ways to replicate the sensation he had experienced with Nike. He left Cambridge and moved to New York, where he started a laboratory for what he called “contagious media.” At Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, Peretti, together with like-minded friends including his sister, Chelsea, an aspiring stand-up comic, produced what would come to be regarded as early independent benchmarks of virality: blackpeopleloveus.com—in which white people try to ingratiate themselves with black friends in a manner so compellingly offensive that it earned a piece in The New York Times; and the “breakup hotline,” a telephone number and accompanying website for women attempting to rid themselves of unwanted suitors. “I was trying to have an impact on culture,” Peretti says.
Where Watts believed in “embracing” randomness, Peretti nodded to it but had seen that he possessed a talent for improving the odds of a viral launch. Watts would later say, “Basically, he’s a prankster.”
Which was why he thought Peretti and Lerer should meet.
Stopthenra.com did not, in the end, stop the NRA. The goal was to ensure that the Clinton-era assault-weapon ban would not expire in September 2004. And though the ban did end—Congress simply avoided voting on it—Lerer would remain pleased with the effort. (Later that year he donated the site to the Jim Brady gun-control campaign.) For Peretti, the experience provided important lessons. He had learned through the Nike saga how essential a role mainstream media played in adding legitimacy to a viral meme, a lesson underscored by Lerer’s PR skill. But there was something more, a point that Watts had raised early in his book.
The problem with Stop the NRA was that it spoke to an audience that was, in Watts’s words, already “clustered.” That audience was akin to a group of friends or colleagues who already knew one another. As an example of “clustering,” Watts cited a science-fiction trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which Earth is a land of atomized steel caves, as opposed to Solaria, where all communication is virtual. On Earth, everyone whom everyone knows is known intimately, but they do not know anyone else. On Solaria, the connections are vast, but weak.
It is almost too convenient to read that passage and, given the state of the news business in 2003, not think of newspapers as the equivalent of all those steel caves, sealed off and closely bound. In the two generations since the great migration of readers from the cities to the suburbs, the prevailing wisdom in newsrooms was that readers, having abandoned the outward view of the street for the inward view of the backyard, cared only about what was taking place in closest proximity. To work in a newsroom with a strong suburban readership was to be told, time and again, that the metric for success was market penetration, and that looking outward beyond geographical limits of the circulation area was a kind of journalistic heresy. Meanwhile, a whole new way of disseminating information was exploding—sending stories and news into those heretofore seemingly impregnable caves, and ending the monopolies on content. Readers may have still wanted their newspapers, but they no longer needed them as they once had.
The alternative to the steel caves, to the “clusters,” was the ephemeral network of Solaria. But where, in the here and now, did that network exist? How could it be harnessed? Peretti, whose stock in trade was the dissemination of pieces of disconnected content, believed he had an answer: He called it the Bored At Work Network. All across the world, he believed, men and women sat at their desks, staring at computer screens, bored senseless. How better to provide a momentary relief from the tedium than to disseminate something so engagingly simple that recipients would take a moment to forward it to friends—Rule No. 1 of the Peretti School of Viral Content: It must be explainable in a sentence.
What was forwarded, of course, reflected something about the sender, which, as Watts pointed out, was why few ever send pornography—not cool. And while a good deal of these bits of content had all the permanence of footprints in sand, every so often the Bored At Work Network would light up, and weak links were instantly transformed into strong ones. A vast network sprang to life.
“It’s hard to reproduce,” Peretti would later say. “It’s hard to understand.” But when it happened, its power was palpable.

Which was why Lerer remained undeterred. the 2004 presidential campaign had begun, and for Democrats there was the growing sense that President Bush, saddled by the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, could be defeated. Peretti was still experimenting with contagious projects and teaching at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) when Lerer called with an idea: He wanted Peretti to fly to Los Angeles to meet Arianna Huffington.
Lerer had met her that year, at a dinner on the Upper East Side. His wife had declined the invitation and Lerer went reluctantly, only to find himself succumbing to the charm that had worked so well for so long on so many people. Lerer thought it might be a good idea for Huffington to meet his young collaborator. At that moment, Peretti represented that small sliver of American society who had no idea who Lerer was talking about.
In the fall of 2004, Arianna Huffington was well along in yet another iteration of what her many critics and perhaps even some of her many friends might call the Saga of Arianna.
Very long story short: Huffington, née Stassinopoulos, child of a Greek newspaper owner of inconsistent success, escapes a relatively friendless adolescence in Athens for England, where in short order she joins and becomes a featured member of the Cambridge debating Union and thereby a) discovers the power of words b) meets lots of people and, as a result, c) starts to appear on television d) writes a best-selling book on feminism and e) meets and falls in love with the cultural critic Bernard Levin who, she jokes in what becomes a familiar refrain is twice her age and half her size. She is 5’10”. She breaks off with Levin after seven years; she wants children, he does not. She writes two more books (the second a biography of Maria Callas that results in a plagiarism suit that ends in a settlement with an author that she would later consider a friend) and relocates to New York, where, with the help of such social luminaries as Ann Getty and Barbara Walters becomes so ubiquitous a fixture on the Upper East Side party circuit that in 1983 she is anointed with a profile in New York magazine: “The Rise and Rise of Arianna Stassinopoulos.” Three years later, she marries, seemingly well, the Texas gas and oil heir Michael Huffington, a Republican whose political career she helps guide through his election to Congress in 1992. Then comes Huffington’s unsuccessful 1994 run for the Senate, during which the glowing picture of Arianna as the eager young woman about town devolves into a portrait so calculating that she calls to mind Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. The marriage ends in 1997—Michael Huffington later reveals that he is bisexual—leaving Arianna with a house in Brentwood she shares with her sister and two daughters, and with a lingering reputation as a woman of somewhat curious opinions on alternative lifestyles and healthy living (she is a fiend about sleep), fueled by her association with one John-Roger, the leader of the cultlike Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. Arianna, contributor to the National Review, evolves into a “progressive.” She runs for governor. She gets less than 1 percent of the vote. She returns to writing books—there will be 13 in all—as well as a blog, Ariannaonline, when one morning in the fall of 2004, Jonah Peretti, who had flown in the night before and who had spent the night in the guestroom, comes into the dining room at 7 a.m. to discover that he is her second breakfast meeting of the day.
Laurie David, then-wife of the dyspeptic Larry, soon joins them, and Peretti is whisked along on a private jet for a flight to Sacramento for a rally in support of the Senate candidacy of Phil Angelides. In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. “I loved being a gatherer,” Huffington would later say. “I don’t really think you can make gathering mistakes.”
Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. “Arianna,” he says, “can make weak ties into strong ties.”
He returned to New York to discover that Lerer was already a few steps ahead of him. He wanted to talk about the venture the three of them would embark upon. “I remember him saying things like, ‘We don’t want to build a big website,’” Peretti would recall. “‘We want to build an influential site.’”


2. Sticky
Precisely what occurred at the Huffington home in Brentwood a few weeks later, after George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in 2004, is open to both debate and litigation. The nature of the dispute has to do with who exactly came up with the idea for what would become Huffington Post. All sorts of well-connected people—all connected to Arianna—had all sorts of ideas about how people of fame and influence on the left could make that influence felt. Among the 30 or so people invited—Larry David, Norman Lear, Meg Ryan, David Geffen—was one conservative outlier, Matt Drudge’s associate, the late Andrew Breitbart, who would later tell Wired that the site was his idea all along. Two other participants, Democratic consultants Peter Daou and James Boyce, would insist that the idea was theirs, and would six years later sue Huffington and Lerer. The case is pending.
Still, the sense of those assembled was that the left needed an answer to the power of Matt Drudge—the secretive, right-leaning loner who had become the political world’s primary purveyor of content and opinion—and that perhaps Arianna’s many friends could help. People offered suggestions about how this might work. Lerer, as was his habit, said almost nothing; he had long cultivated the reputation of a canny strategist by being a good listener who waited until everyone else had their say before offering a trenchant opinion. Yet there was one constant in the comments: how to make best use of the growing fascination with blogging.
The phenomenon had with remarkable speed spawned a culture whose chief practitioners celebrated the end of the traditional way information flowed: top to bottom. No longer, the blogging champions claimed, would the power to disseminate ideas and information reside with the legacy news organizations. The Web had made everyone a publisher—even, it was repeated endlessly, the fellow who stayed in his pajamas all day.
Back in New York, Peretti reasoned that to try to replicate Drudge by being like Drudge would do no good. Those competitors who had tried—Drudge Retort, BuzzFlash—had gained little traction. “You could be 50 percent better but it wouldn’t matter,” he later said. “No one would need it.” Drudge already owned the franchise on what Peretti called “stickiness”—the capacity to have readers return, time and again.
While Drudge was sticky, so too were the bloggers, many of whom presented ideas that could be shared and, as a result, created communities among like-minded people, clusters. Clusters, while tightly knit, tended to grow slowly. Peretti wanted to grow fast.
He had already seen how effectively he could spread content. But the networks he created did not last. Arianna Huffington’s networks did. He had watched her move between networks she had created—no one, he believed, worked harder at it—all the while connecting people in a way that made them feel a part of something. It was not merely making weak ties into strong ones: “She makes her weak ties feel like strong ties.” And that, he recognized, “creates a large network of all kinds of people who feel close to you. That’s really important for power.”
To succeed, he concluded, the site that was to become Huffington Post would have to be both viral and sticky. People would have to feel a connection that brought them back. They would also need to have things they could share with other people. And what better way to take fullest advantage of the blogging boom than to have famous people do it? The blogging world might well hate it, but “they wouldn’t be able not to look,” he later said. “Even the haters would come every day.”
If the site was to be a blog, it had to look like a blog, and for that he would need to build it with blogging software. He chose Moveable Type and set about building a prototype. It was up to Lerer to raise the seed money—$1 million. And it was up to Huffington to find the bloggers. She wanted Arthur Schlesinger; he was a friend. So was Larry David. And John Cusack. And Harry Shearer.
Who wasn’t?

3. Contagious
Eyebeam’s “Contagious Media Showdown” began on Saturday, May 7, 2005, with a series of workshops and the launch of a contest, whose winners would be judged, fittingly, not on the aesthetics of their viral creations but on the metrics: hits, page views, unique visits, unique users, bandwidth, etc.
Submissions included Cryingwhileeating.com, thebrainfreeze.com, fartingsaucers.com, and the eventual winner, forgetmenotpanties615,562 unique visitors! Jonah Peretti was the kickoff speaker. Four years had passed since he had hit the send button on his Nike campaign, and in that time, he had helped spawn a phenomenon that had developed a culture all its own and was moving beyond its underground roots. MSNBC, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times covered the event with the sort of tender wonder associated with seeing a child’s first drawing.
Huffington Post’s debut came two days later, and the reaction to it was decidedly less enthusiastic. The site was not handsome. But to its founders that was beside the point. Peretti, who like Huffington and Lerer was unencumbered by journalistic sensibilities, understood that all that really mattered was ease of use. Except for the “splash” headline and the tile architecture that the site would soon adopt, the HuffPost of May 2005 looked like a stripped-down version of today’s.
The launch featured an introductory blog by Huffington herself, along with blogs by, yes, Arthur Schlesinger, Larry David, and a much-maligned co-bylined post by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her husband, Brad Hall, on gay marriage. The knives were out: “I’m predicting it’ll be at least as successful as Arianna’s last campaign for governor, and you can quote me on that,” wrote Ned Rice in National Review Online. “The problem with blogs like The Huffington Post is that they divert our attention from real and serious journalism,” wrote Cal Thomas of Tribune Media Services, which had been carrying ariannaonline.com. But no one could rival the delighted venom of Nikki Finke in LA Weekly: “Judging from Monday’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many.” Finke went on to hit where it seemed likely to hurt most, suggesting that Arianna’s Hollywood friends wanted little to do with the venture.
In truth, there was little need to scrounge for copy; all sorts of people were willing to have a turn once they realized how easy it was to send along their musings. There was little in the way of editing, save for some cosmetic tending to prose, and the admonition, especially to the writers among them, to “be bloggier.”

By May 2006, Time had anointed Huffington one of the world’s 100 most influential people—along with Matt Drudge. Lerer had raised another $5 million and the site, depending on who was doing the counting, had between 760,000 and 1.3 million monthly unique visitors. Huffington announced the hiring of Melinda Henneberger, a former reporter for the The New York Times and Newsweek, in an effort to create original content generated by a salaried employee. Huffington seemed to be inviting everyone she encountered to blog, including the doctor who had tended to her broken foot. Money was coming in; in June, the JWT advertising agency bought all the site’s advertising space for a single week to promote such clients as JetBlue, Levi’s, and Ford, at a cost reportedly in the low six figures. Newsweek included Arianna on its cover for its story on women and power.
And yet there remained something unseemly about the whole enterprise, especially to journalists, a sense that in making its own rules Huffington Post had violated a few too many. Its newsgathering was done by others, even if the commentary was original. The bloggers were not paid—a fact that did not stop people from joining in—me included. I wrote 14 blog posts for Huffington Post for one reason only: I had a book coming out, and it was clear that if I wanted to reach potential buyers, Huffington Post provided an ever-widening platform. Many writers without marquee names were submitting pieces and not only seeing them posted, but sometimes surpassing the posts of the famous contributors.
Being able to see their names, or better still, their bylines—with tiny, pinky-nail photos—meant that these unpaid contributors had joined the phenomenon Huffington talked of and celebrated above all others: the Conversation. And in providing all these people with a forum, Huffington Post had succeeded in extending and strengthening the reach of its ever wider, and stickier, network.
That fall, HuffPost traffic surpassed that of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, though it still lagged behind that of the big players: CNN, Yahoo, the Times, and its self-appointed nemesis, Drudge. The site, which had started with fewer than 10 employees—most in New York, with Huffington and Roy Sekoff in Los Angeles—began to hire, slowly. Among the newcomers was a former student of Peretti’s, Paul Berry. Peretti was getting restless—he was planning to start his own laboratory, a company to be called BuzzFeed—and he needed someone who could transform the already impressive traffic numbers into the metrics worthy of the contagious phenomenon he had helped spawn.
4. Disruptive
By the time he arrived at Huffington Post in 2007, it was as if all of Paul Berry’s life experience had prepared him to become the site’s lord of traffic. He was 30 years old, recently married, and possessed an air of infectious enthusiasm. He spoke in a loud voice. He laughed often, and loudly. Peretti had seen possibilities in him as a graduate student at NYU’s ITP, and invited him to be part of the Contagious Media project at Eyebeam. By then, Berry had long abandoned his youthful dream of writing fiction—he studied Latin American literature as an undergrad—and had found work of moderate fulfillment as a coder and Web developer.
He had spent part of his childhood in Mexico City, where his father, Tim, worked for UPI before settling in Silicon Valley. Tim, who taught Paul to code when he was eight, eventually founded his own company, which sold downloadable business software—at least until the dotcom crash of 2000. Paul headed to Mexico, where he found work as a $25-an-hour developer, all the while feeling painfully removed from the ferment and excitement of the great digital disruption unfolding at home. “I needed to be close to the change of history,” he recalled. “It’s like there’s an earthquake happening and the land is splitting and there’s this gaping hole. It’s that obvious.”
He returned to New York, where his skills led to work at a real-estate finance firm. But the work did not excite him. Berry enrolled at NYU’s ITP, where he’d taken a class as an undergrad, studying with Clay Shirky, the media theorist. To the school’s chagrin, he kept his job and maintained a full class load.
Two weeks before teachers were to submit grades, Berry unveiled Teachers On the Run, a site where ITP students could rate and comment on their professors. It became an in-house sensation, especially after one woman posted an anonymous comment criticizing a professor for staring at her breasts. “Everybody was just in a frenzy,” he recalled. Here, after all, was an unnamed student leveling a troubling accusation against a professor in a public forum. Was this slanderous? Was it a grudge? Was it wrong to post? Berry did not think so, especially after more women added their comments, supporting the charge. The school’s administration wanted it shut down, though Shirky stuck up for him. Berry had witnessed, as Peretti had with his Nike campaign, the power an idea could muster if it found its audience.
Teachers on the Run was a crude experiment, especially compared to Berry’s project a year later for Peretti’s class: Dog Island. Unlike Teachers on the Run, Dog Island was a hoax, a make-believe resort where dog owners could send their pets, for a respite, or forever. Berry chose a rough look for his first draft. But the sense of the class was that he had not succeeded in making Dog Island feel like canine paradise; it needed to be slicker. In Peretti’s class, Berry learned there was a process to creating content with viral capability: iteration. “In Jonah’s approach to viral, there is a structure,” Berry says. “You get close to chaos in how you develop. But there’s a structure of feedback from key people.”
That structure, he was beginning to learn, meant developing an idea, presenting it to an audience, and, depending on their reactions, tweaking, adjusting, even overhauling. “It’s insanely rare that on the first try you have it right.” Dog Island did find its audience. There were dog lovers who came to hate it, assuming that sending small pets to Dog Island spelled their doom. Berry did not dissuade them, suggesting that, alas, from time to time big dogs did kill little dogs, because that was the natural order of things.
“Dog Island was the most fun, because I’m a traffic junkie,” he recalls. “There is a thrill when someone tells you about something you’ve done without knowing you’ve done it.” Something so compelling, alluring, amusing, and so beyond the need for explanation, he adds, “they have to share it.”
Berry had discovered a way to make a living by becoming a creative player in the great disruption. In the culture of “scrappiness,” failure was part of the joy of the work, as he and Peretti found at HuffPost: “Let’s have an idea on Monday. Instead of having a lot of meetings about that idea, let’s just fucking do that idea. By Wednesday, we will have realized the flaw in the idea and we’ll have iterated it, so by Friday, it’s totally different, and it’s either executed or almost done.”
And measured. Everything had to be measured. “Traffic,” he says, “was the measure of success. It showed if we could be a real business.”

But what, exactly, was that business? By 2007, Huffington Post had taken $10 million in investment. This figure was considered modest by venture-capital standards, but it did suggest, none too subtly, the nature of the enterprise: Raise money, raise the profile, raise more money, and then, when the moment and price were right, look for an exit. That could not happen without revenue, and the revenue would not come without traffic. And traffic, much to his delight, was Paul Berry’s to chase.
In the years to come, much would be made—not all of it kindly—of HuffPost’s success in search engine optimization, or, as its critics insisted, figuring out how to stay a step ahead of the Google search algorithm. “All you had to do was study,” Berry now says. “All you had to do was have compassion for Google’s rules.” And while that may sound too disingenuous by half, there is truth to it. Berry did study, and then he did what he and Peretti had always done: They iterated. Berry launched blogs, stories aggregated from elsewhere, photo slide shows, lists—and measured each of those launches in real time, adjusting, pushing as he went. When he and his small New York staff logged off at the end of yet another interminable day, he handed things over to the team of programmers and coders in Ukraine and South America, thereby ensuring that the work, and the measuring, never stopped. With Peretti ever more involved with BuzzFeed, with Huffington in Brentwood, and with Lerer concerning himself primarily with the business, the growing HuffPost newsroom effectively became Berry’s to run.
The space, a loft on lower Broadway above Dean & DeLuca, was a big room with long rows of desks. It was a workplace that approximated the experience of Lord of the Flies. In the absence of grown-ups, or any tradition as to how things were supposed to happen, bright and eager people in their 20s spent a lot time of yelling at one another, all the while competing to see who could drive the most traffic until the end of yet another 12-hour day, when they would head outside and drink together. “There was a feeling that we were making up the rules as we went along,” says one of them. “Most of us had so little work experience that we didn’t know it wasn’t normal.” The absence of criticism represented praise.
People came and went, and when they left, their jobs were filled by someone who might be given a half day of training on Moveable Type and cropping photos before being thrown in the deep end. “There wasn’t a lot of guidance on how things were supposed to go,” says another former employee, who, like others, asked not to be identified for fear of offending the former employer. Berry was a most approachable boss, especially if someone had an idea about something new that might entice visitors; no one could recall his ever asking for a memo, or saying no. That slide show might work, give me 20 minutes. There were new hires who understood, seemingly without explanation, that lists were always done best in odd numbers, because a top 10 list felt like, well, a Top 10 list. Some were not so happy, though, especially those who had come in the naïve hope of creating original works of journalism. They tended to leave, which was just as well, because those who stayed came to see that while a succession of editors took turns addressing the staff about news and content, the speaker who mattered was Berry. He spoke in his animated way about SEO and headlines, why nouns were better search terms than verbs—Michael Jackson Death, not Michael Jackson Dies. The ethos of the HuffPost newsroom was winning the Google search. “That,” says a former employee, “was the thrill.”
Not the origination of the content, but the dissemination. Huffington Post, they understood, was not an enterprise whose core purpose was the creation of works of journalism—as significant or mundane as that can be. It was in the content business, which created all sorts of possibilities of what it could gather and, with a new headline and assorted tags, send back out, HuffPost’s logo affixed. Content would come to mean original reporting by Sam Stein or Ryan Grim from Washington, as well as Alec Baldwin’s blog, Robert Reich’s rants about the forsaking of the American worker, a “Best Retro Bathing Suits” slide show, “Why Women Gladly Date Ugly Men,” David Wood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 10-part series on wounded veterans, “Nine Year Old Girl’s Twin Found Inside Her Stomach,” campaign dispatches from the Off The Bus citizen journalists, “Angelina and Brad Wow at Cannes,” and “Multitasking Wilts Your Results and Relationships”—as well as Nico Pitney’s blogging on the violence after the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections and the 111,000 comments it generated. Because comment was content, too. Comment was like blogging, but at scale. Thousands of comments began to pile up alongside the posts that had generated the commentary. It was as if the posts and blogs were spawning subsidiary posts, the contagious media world’s version of a virtuous circle.
Traffic-counting metrics were at once impossibly complex and elegantly simple: If it’s moving, push it; if it’s not, change it or bury it. There were also surprises that the nimble HuffPost could leap upon, giving it wins over its competitors. On the afternoon that Heath Ledger died in 2008, for instance, the folks at HuffPost discovered that people were entering not his given first name as a search term, but the more familiar-sounding “Keith.” The name Keith was added to the tags, and all that Keith-generated traffic belonged to HuffPost.
Still, there was one caveat to the traffic hunt of which Berry was keenly aware: “The brand still mattered to us.” Which meant that there was a limit to the number of best-starlet-nipple slide shows the site could, or should, run. The blogs could not be HuffPost’s sole purveyor of depth. Nor could the business continue to grow if it was perceived to be yet another political site. Even as traffic climbed in 2007, there was a sense that HuffPost might face a dramatic drop after the presidential election, then still a year and a half away. Looking ahead, Peretti installed traffic-measurement widgets—and discovered that fully half of the site’s traffic came from non-political stories. So in the spring of 2007, HuffPost launched new verticals for media, business, entertainment, and, reflecting Arianna’s mission to spread the virtues of health and spirituality, Living Now.
The 2008 presidential election was indeed a bonanza for politics sites, HuffPost especially. Four years after the re-election of George W. Bush, a Democrat would be elected president and Huffington Post had almost doubled Drudge’s traffic, eclipsing The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. By September 2008, the site had become the traffic leader among its competitors, with 4.5 million monthly unique visitors—an increase of 474 percent over the previous September.
A few weeks after the election, Huffington Post announced that it had secured another $25 million in funding, this time from Oak Investment Partners, whose president, Fredric Harman, joined the HuffPost board. That brought total investment to $37 million, which had analysts estimating HuffPost’s worth at over $100 million. The money, announced the company’s new ceo, Eric Hippeau, would go toward acquisitions and hiring. Within a year, the company added local verticals in several American cities, launched the 23/6 comedy site—with its 2 million monthly uniques—and, perhaps most significant, entered into a news-sharing partnership with Facebook, to be called HuffPost Social News.
Yet there was still enduring criticism of the way HuffPost went about its work, especially from those whose stories were aggregated on HuffPost; over time, those pieces appeared at ever greater length on the site, diminishing the likelihood that readers would follow a link back to the source. Google News was, in comparison, a generous aggregator; it was essentially a headline and first-graph operation. Archrival Drudge consisted entirely of links back to the source. HuffPost, on the other hand, was far greedier about holding onto its readers. While it never stopped supplying links, it made them just a little harder to find. It seemed the sharing was to be one-sided.
No wonder there was gloating in media accounts of the 2010 demise of HuffPost’s self-congratulatory, yearlong foray into investigative reporting—one that Arianna had proclaimed was launched to “save” that honored, expensive, journalistic form. The Investigative Fund’s executive editor, Larry Roberts, whom HuffPost had snagged from The Washington Post, left after less than a year, and HuffPost’s attempts to have the enterprise incorporated as a nonprofit ran into a legal thicket, given that HuffPost itself was a decidedly for-profit venture that, as Gawker took great pleasure in pointing out, was the chief beneficiary of the dispatches the unit produced. The Investigative Unit, along with its funding, ended up being absorbed by its partner, the Center for Public Integrity.
And yet, despite the occasional misstep, the story of Huffington Post began to assume a relentless familiarity: month after month, year after year, the metrics moved in only one enviable, and northerly, direction. More and more verticals appeared—Style, Technology, Green, Sports, College, Books. HuffPost readers, comScore reported in 2008, were younger than those of Politico and Drudge. And when, in the fall of 2009, HuffPost’s 10 million monthly unique visits hurtled it past The Washington Post’s traffic, Hippeau took note, in an interview with paidContent.com.
“We are now,” he said, “in the big leagues.”
Exclusive CJR interview: Arianna Huffington on what makes a good “gatherer.”
5. Voracious

A week shy of the first anniversary of their February 2011 union, Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong arrived at an already crowded television studio at AOL’s lower Manhattan offices for yet another display of their capacity to command attention.
The ostensible reason was the formal announcement of the latest in a series of ventures undertaken by the Huffington Post Media Group, now a property of Armstrong’s AOL: 12 hours a day, five days a week of live video streaming. The press corps nibbled on lamb crostini with rosemary aioli while several staff Huffington had poached from the Times joined her in working the room.
The gathering was called to order. Armstrong spoke first. He recalled the first time he had met Huffington, in November of 2010, and how that led, many months later, to halftime at the 2011 Super Bowl, when AOL announced that it had agreed to pay $315 million in what was widely regarded as a desperate move to salvage its declining fortunes by buying Huffington Post and handing control of its editorial operation to Huffington herself. “We believe that content is king,” he said. “We also believe that brand is king.”
With that he yielded the floor to Arianna Huffington.
Huffington Post, she said, had evolved from “a fast-moving train to a supersonic jet.” One hundred and seventy journalists had been hired since the purchase—even as AOL laid off close to 2,500 people and shut down its own journalistic ventures, among them Politics Daily.* Even now, she continued, 20 reporters and six editors were at work on what promised to be a 75-part series on the hard times facing the middle class, a potentially dispiriting portrait that would mercifully be offset by HuffPost’s “Good News” vertical—“Man recovers wallet after 35 years!”
The video rolled. An actor playing a host brought a reporter from the On Celebrity vertical into a discussion about divorce, while ads rolled across the bottom of the screen and make-believe viewers were invited to join in the discussion via Skype. “We’re not creating a new brand,” said Roy Sekoff, now the project’s director. “We’re just doing what Huffington Post already does.”
To underscore the point, Huffington offered an example: Imagine a host interviewing Beyoncé. An editor from the newsroom breaks in with word of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announcing a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Perhaps, Huffington suggested, the host might want to ask Beyoncé her thoughts about this news.
“Everything in our universe,” she said, “will be featured here.”
Tim Armstrong looked on and smiled and let Huffington do the talking, which made good sense, given that this was now her show. And lest there be any confusion, four large photographs hung in the hallway just outside of the studio: Arianna with Suze Orman and Arianna with Jamie Oliver and Arianna with a group of happy young people and Arianna with Mark Ruffalo and, then, Tim Armstrong.
Armstrong had come to AOL in 2009 after making his name overseeing sales and advertising at Google. He was 43, tall and handsome, the sort of man whom central casting might send over if the part screamed: successful. But at AOL he had inherited a company that, to put it bluntly—and many did—had no discernible reason to exist. AOL had once dominated the online landscape. But that was in the late 1990s, light years away in digital time. Its original core business, dial-up Internet service, was evaporating, even as it moved to transform itself into a content business. Armstrong seemed just the man to accomplish a turnaround; he was also a major investor in Patch, a network of local-news websites that AOL bought after his arrival.
Still, the decline of AOL provided a harsh lesson about corporate lifespans in the digital world. Nineteen years after its IPO and 11 after its $350 billion market-value merger with Time Warner, AOL was losing 19,000 customers a week.
So eager was AOL to boost its content-driven traffic that in late 2010 it devised a strategy, The AOL Way. Management set markers: Monthly story production rate was to rise from 33,000 to 55,000, video from 4 percent of the content to 70 percent. All staffers were to write between five and 10 stories a day. To help them make those numbers, AOL produced a 60-page handbook filled with graphs, content flow charts, and such exhortations as “Each article should be profitable and generate at least 7k PVs/story.” Editors were to “Identify High-Demand Topics”; guidelines were provided to “breaking, seasonal, and evergreen.” Editors were commanded to calculate a story’s “profitability consideration.” “Site leaders” were expected to have on hand no less than eight packages that could produce $1 million in revenue. One employee anonymously told Business Insider, which broke the story, “AOL is the most fucked-up, bullshit company on earth.”
The AOL Way was, with apologies to Maimondes, “a guide for the perplexed.” The problem was that AOL was neither a legacy news organization, which produced content that people would, in fact, want to read and share, nor did it have the DNA of, say, a Huffington Post.
The Huffington Post, however, was said to be looking for a buyer.

When Armstrong met Arianna Huffington, Huffington would later say, they hit it off so famously that by the end of that first meeting, they were finishing each other’s sentences. Two months later, AOL announced the purchase, $295 million of it in cash. Notably absent from the agreement was a non-compete clause. Ken Lerer left and started his own venture capital firm, Lerer Ventures, which Eric Hippeau soon joined. Peretti left for BuzzFeed. Berry would leave several months later and take up residence across a spacious room from Lerer Ventures—one floor below the original Huffington Post newsroom. HuffPost resided in the sleek lower Broadway office of AOL. Of the three founders of the Huffington Post, only Arianna Huffington remained. In a sense, she was just getting started.
She had moved back to New York from Los Angeles in 2010, and had quickly established her presence in the newsroom, to the confusion and occasional chagrin of all those young people who had grown accustomed to a workplace with no discernible adults. HuffPost was by then making big-name hires—Howard Fineman came from Newsweek that September. Peter Goodman and Tim O’Brien were hired from the Times. The HuffPost Washington bureau, which had begun as a one-person operation and which had celebrated the first time President Obama called on Sam Stein at a press conference, had grown to 26 reporters who, in a city where power is defined by whether calls get returned, now fielded complaints from the offices of both Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell.
By 2012, Huffington Post had grown so big that its critics—and even some of its fans—were beginning to suggest that, if anything, it had gotten too big, bloated with so many stories in so many verticals that it was leaving itself vulnerable to such new and more nimble content dissemination ventures. Not incidentally, Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed claimed 25 million monthly unique visitors in January. HuffPost was also, arguably, encumbered by a parent company that, despite, a late 2011 uptick in advertising revenue—and the reward of a boost in its stock price—had still ended the year with a 3-percent drop in fourth-quarter revenue.
Yet one metric spoke louder than any other about just what it was that Tim Armstrong concluded he was getting when he bought HuffPost: comment. In February, Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief, reported on a Houston gathering at which several wealthy men gathered to pool $100 million to stop the president’s re-election. As good as the scoop was, the response was even more telling: 21,000 comments. It was not unusual for HuffPost stories to generate comment measured in five digits. If, as essayist Paul Ford wrote, the fundamental question animating the Web is “Why wasn’t I consulted?” then Huffington Post could be fairly credited with succeeding at making a great many people feel that, in fact, they were being consulted, and better still, that HuffPost was grateful for their thoughts.
A quarter million comments land in HuffPost’s assorted in-boxes every day. The initial sorting—weeding out spam and offensive “trolls”—is done technologically; in 2010, HuffPost bought Adaptive Semantics, which had created software for evaluating the “emotional” nature of content, the better to ferret out the most vituperative screeds. But once that screening is done, the work of deciding what to post is left, intentionally, to people who work at HuffPost, as well as to the site’s most frequent commenters. In 2010, HuffPost decided to reward its most engaged readers with three “badges” that signify the extent of that engagement: “networkers,” who draw fans and followers; “superusers,” who share often on Facebook and Twitter and who also comment frequently; and “moderators” who, in recognition of their keen eye and absorption of the site’s ethos, are trusted with deleting comments they judge inappropriate.
Taken together, the badgeholders serve as voluntary traffic wardens for what truly makes Huffington Post so valuable to a company like AOL: Not brand. Not content. But access to the HuffPost network. It is not just the visit and page-view numbers, because those metrics, envied as they are, inevitably include a vast number of fly-bys, one-time visitors, the long tail of the Bored At Work network. But comments suggest loyalty, and loyalty—or engagement, to use the buzzy ad-world term—means an audience that advertisers can, in the ephemeral world of the Web, come close to counting on.
HuffPost, in a sense, has recreated on a grand scale what might be called the Arianna Experience, one that she first learned at Cambridge and which, in the decades since, she has developed into a network of thousands of people of varying degrees of familiarity who are nonetheless connected by virtue of their connection to Arianna. She herself can be somewhat disingenuous about this talent—her mentor as a “gatherer,” she likes to say, was her late mother, who would invite all sorts of people to sit at her table, and who always made sure they were fed. When she reminisces about the Cambridge Union, it is not merely the conversation Arianna speaks of, but rather the experience of a young woman with a Greek accent making a name for herself in that most hidebound British institution by cultivating the power of her words. With words came friends, and with friends came an ever-wider circle of acquaintances, and it did not much matter what they thought or where they lived, because Arianna was not one to “cluster” her associations. Everyone was potentially welcome because—who knew?—some day, they might be worth calling. When Howard Fineman first met her in 1995, she was married to Michael Huffington and hosting salons in their Washington home, where she gathered such one-time kindred spirits as William Bennett, the conservative author and critic, to talk about non-governmental answers to social issues. She and Fineman did not lose touch. He is now HuffPost’s editorial director.
“I’ve never had a bad gathering,” she says. “Some of them may have been more boring, less fascinating. But not bad.” When she is invited to speak in public, she asks that the house lights be turned up so that she can see the faces in the audience. “If you speak, you know when you have the audience, and you know when you lose them,” she says. “I want to see peoples’ eyes. I want to connect to them. I want to speak to what I sense they want to hear next.”
Tim Armstrong paid a good deal of money in the hope that HuffPost’s network might become his, too. And if that is to happen, his fortunes lie, in large measure, with people like Justin Isaf and Travis Donovan who (with apologies to all those who spend their days producing journalism for HuffPost) are part of the larger army of young men and women charged with the work that is at the core of the enterprise: cultivating, feeding, tending, and stroking the network.
“People will do anything for recognition,” says Isaf, who is 28 and a community manager. “When [we] say you’re good enough to be recognized by the whole world, that goes a long way. They become loyal to your brand.”
Donovan, 25, a senior verticals editor whose arms are ornately tattooed, was a social worker before coming to HuffPost, working to integrate a group home of disabled adults into their community. “It’s the exact same thing on social,” he says. “We want to change the landscape of media. News is inherently supposed to be social. It’s supposed to be something you want to talk with your friends about.”
“Once [we] get into someone’s network, we spread within that group,” says Isaf. “They share it. And we spread within it.”
“It’s not that we want to be the cool dinner party,” Donovan adds. “We want to be the table itself.”
An intriguing aspiration, not only for Huffington Post but for every enterprise, existing or still being imagined, that sees in the story of HuffPost’s rise a series of replicable steps that assure success. This sort of thinking troubles Duncan Watts. In the end, some things just happen. There is a confluence of events that could not be envisioned, that came together in precisely the right way and at the right time and which, in hindsight, could not have been predicted. “I know that they didn’t know they were going to succeed,” Watts says of the HuffPost founders. It was not just their complementary skills and temperaments. It was also the moment—the blogging phenomenon, the bitterness of the left after 2004, the coming of Web 2.0 and the excitement of the 2008 election, the rise of the Bored at Work Network, the evolving ease of technology—all of it, all at once. The rhythmic clapping in the sixth inning that, as Watts would put it, cannot necessarily be replicated in the seventh.
“The larger point of this is that we think deterministically,” he says. “If you think about the major religions, they’re deterministic—creator, plan, faith, destiny, causality. Journalists are prone to this. They tell stories. And stories are confining. There is a tendency to kind of tell a story that makes it seem as if everything had to happen the way it did.”
The Huffington Post was supposed to be the left’s answer to Drudge. At least that is how the story was framed. HuffPost borrowed from Drudge. And from the bloggers. And from Blackpeopleloveus.com and the Contagious Media Lab and Stop the NRA and Ariannaonline. Then it set about doing what comes so naturally in the digital world, and which the legacy journalistic world still struggles to master: It iterated. It did not try to eliminate the possibility of failure. It did something different. It embraced it.
* The original version of this piece reported that AOL’s Daily Finance was shut down, along with Politics Daily, after AOL and Huffington Post merged. But Daily Finance was not shuttered, and we regret the error.

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Comments Post a Comment
Wow, how did you manage to spell the subject's name wrong in the photo caption?
#1 Posted by Gladys, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 12:35 AM

Thanks, it's been fixed.
#2 Posted by Alysia Santo, CJR on Tue 24 Apr 2012 at 12:27 PM

This is a good article but I think you forgot to include the rest of the history of time and all living things...
Seriously, I perhaps spent half an hour reading through this story, and only got half way! I mean, sure it's good to be thorough and provide a bit of background context et cetera, but I feel like there's so much context swimming around I actually know what these people ordered for lunch when they met.
In saying that though I did actually enjoy the first half of the piece and you should be proud of writing such a fine and comprehensive work.
Warmest regards,
Square.
#3 Posted by square, CJR on Thu 26 Apr 2012 at 09:55 AM

Fantastic article with a lot of interesting background information. I feel more educated for reading it; thanks for writing it.
#4 Posted by Sam, CJR on Sun 29 Apr 2012 at 02:00 PM

Many thanks Sam
#5 Posted by Michael Shapiro, CJR on Tue 1 May 2012 at 10:39 AM

So, is the Huff Post brand stronger than the AOL brand now?
Also, what is behind the folding of sites like Black Voices and AOL Latino into what are essentially just channels on Huff Post....just cost-cutting moves?
#6 Posted by Carlos, CJR on Wed 2 May 2012 at 11:41 AM
98#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-29 11:23:43 | 只看该作者
本帖最后由 admin 于 2012-5-29 11:45 编辑

【案例】
郭全中现在业界的有两种观点比较流行:转型是找死,不转是等死。进一步延伸是:转型是折腾死,不转是安乐死!所以转型的窗口就这样一点一点被关闭!
@新浪传媒[url=http://weibo.com/verify][/url]:【加拿大最大报业集团宣布裁员并缩减发行规模】加拿大第一大报纸出版商Postmedia Network昨天宣布,将裁减旗下多份重要日报的编辑人员,同时缩减印刷版发行规模。Postmedia称,将不再在卡尔加里和渥太华等城市发行周日版。在加拿大,报纸的周日版在一周内发行量最小,而周六版的发行量最大。(周梅)



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Canada’s Postmedia cuts copy editing jobs, stops some print editions
Craig Silverman May 28, 2012 4:48 pm
At company-wide meetings held late this afternoon, Postmedia Network, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, announced it is cutting editing positions at several of its largest city dailies and will stop printing paper editions on certain days.

This change is similar to recent announcements from the Denver Post (reducing copy editors) and the New Orleans Times-Picayune (stopping print editions on certain days). Journalism school professor and Postmedia adviser Jeff Jarvis tweeted today in response to the news (which he says he did not know in advance):
1.5 dozen daily papers in NAmerica are no longer daily. How fast will this trend spread?
— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 28, 2012
Postmedia hasn't issued a public statement, but media reporters in Canada, including The Globe And Mail's Steve Ladurantaye, began tweeting the news from the 3 p.m. meetings held in cities including Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Toronto. (more...)
Latest NewsMediaWire

http://www.longxin.swust.edu.cn/forum.php?mod=post&action=edit&fid=36&tid=3763&pid=37635&page=20





99#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-5-30 00:22:35 | 只看该作者
【案例】
刘海明8888尝试可以,若仅仅为冲击个世界纪录,和行为艺术没有什么两样。报出版报纸,应遵循报纸规律,不能为冲击什么世界之最而故意制造奇迹。这不是理性的新闻行为。我们当课堂剖析的案例了。//@长虹公司刘海中: 电子网络时代纸质报纸向报纸书挺进,看或不看,收藏先
@郑州晚报[url=http://weibo.com/verify][/url]:【郑州晚报明日零售点】明日本报将以近700个版的规模冲击大世界基尼斯纪录,成本将近30元的报纸只卖1元钱,而且所有收入将全部捐献给慈善事业。明日本报2000员工将走上街头,零售报纸,上百个路口和BRT车站、各个商场门口都设有购买点。全市零售点地图现在公布,请大家看仔细,就近购买报纸。



轉發(495) | 評論(157) 5月29日 17:02 來自新浪微博
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100#
 楼主| 发表于 2012-6-2 23:13:04 | 只看该作者
【案例】
谭天论道//@西西2999: //@王楠-联著实业:如果是谈在网络环境下报业如何生存,此文的观点完全忽略了内容在网络中的传播规律和价值体现。如果是谈如何守住纸媒在线下的一点市场,此文的观点就如同鸵鸟把头埋在沙丘里,以躲避危险。@闻道阅读平台@南方在
@陈昌凤
@西西2999
@陈国权的微博
@郭全中
@范以锦
@中国网络传播学会【今日微议:纸媒的求生之路】微议一:@四川张立伟:呼吁撤掉电子版拯救纸媒。张教授认为,纸媒数字化进程缺乏防御战略,办电子版是不设防的大漏洞。撤掉电子版,是竖起纸媒防御的第一块盾牌。
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