What It Takes

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"Look at Yahoo or Google or CNN, [and] take away the branding and just look at the headlines, and they're very similar. But if you take away the branding of The Huffington Post and the signage, you'd probably still recognize us." -- Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff says in a 3.31 N.Y. Times profile of the site and its co-founder Arianna Huffington, by Brian Stelter. "We've always wanted to be part of the national conversation," Sekoff also says.

This is pretty much what every successful site does -- provide a distinctive attitude-personality and a community vibe, offer a scan of the daily happenings, and start and fuel a conversation about the topics that matter (or about angles on topics that are unique to the site).

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Posted by Jeffrey Wells on March 31, 2008 at 8:11 AM

comment #1

lazespud says ...

While I agree with you about what makes a successful site (and HE definately qualifies in that regard), his comparison to Google, CNN (cnn.com presumably), or yahoo is bizarre. They are totally different than huffpo. You might as well be dismissive of huffpo because it doesn't prove an all-encompassing search service that is reliable and up-to-date.
And if you were to assume he was comparing Huffpo to cnn.com's content; it still is a dumb comparison; one is (mostly) factual news and one is (mostly) opinion.
In the world of opinionated lefty newsblog/news aggregators, Huffpo is better (IMO) than dailykos, crooks and liars, and most others, but there's no need to draw weird comparisons to sites that aren't similar.

Posted by lazespud at March 31, 2008 10:10 AM

comment #2

jc says ...

I think the point of the quote was that Google, CNN and Yahoo! all look similar because they all draw from AP and Reuters headlines. And then he's contrasting this with HuffPo whose headlines will be different.

Posted by jc at March 31, 2008 10:16 AM

comment #3

T. Holly says ...

I never wanted to be part of the national debate, I just think it's illegal to offer work for free that some entity has paid for and someone has been paid to do, and it feels like it's killing an entire business. That's why I wrote what I did about a clearinghouse that would bring money to the suppliers including the blogs (which are suppliers in their own right). Everybody must get paid. None of this should be for free and I'm willing to pay for the service if someone would develop it, because it would serve me very well and save me a lot of time.

Remember Napster? Say hello to my illegal friend Google (or Yahoo), because it's not web content that's killing print, it's the web that's killing content. I'd pay at least the price of a NYTimes digital subscription (I tried it, it's ridiculous, who wants a screen shot of the NYT on their computer?) for a service where I can access a vast array of the days news and blog content, updated continuously, which has been scanned and organized into a database by a computer program, that I can interface with and pull reports from to appear on my computer screen which resemble a newspaper, with ads and links back to the source, whatever. "Big Daddy Pockets," please develop this right away.

Posted by T. Holly at March 31, 2008 10:49 AM

comment #4

Sweetbubba says ...

The last thing the U.S. needs are more extremist nuts like the Huffington or Daily Kos guys on the left, or the Newsmax or whoever on the right.

It's bad enough the mainstream media is so partitioned between Fox News/WSJ and NY Times/MSNBC etc.- these fringe group websites just encourage further extremism.

Obviously these "media" sites are free to offer whatever content they want, and there's obviously a market interested in solely getting a very biased perspective fed to them, but I can't believe anyone would laud that trend as a positive one.

Posted by Sweetbubba at March 31, 2008 10:18 PM

comment #5