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Gordon's Republic

The Huffington Post/blogs come of age

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The Huffington Post is not exactly your run of the mill blog (it doesn't even like the lable), but it is a blog all the same and the fact that it has appointed a chief executive shows how it, and this aspect of Web 2.0 generally, is fast maturing and becoming an established part of the media landscape.
The Huffington Post, which lists the likes of former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, Norman Mailer and John Cusack among its contributors, has appointed the general manager of CBSNews.com, Betsy Morgan, as chief executive.

It's a big move and a significant one. The Huffington Post might be the fifth most visited blog on the web, according to Technorati with its 3.5m unique users a month (2m less than CBSNews.com), but it is two years old and still a blog.

But it says a lot about where the industry is going and the power of sites like The Huffington Post and other blogs like Gawker and Techcrunch have become big business with their own teams of journalists and editors.

Morgan, who is 38 and has an MBA from Harvard says the move was too good an opportunity to pass up. She also underlined where the power of the The Huffington Post lies. What the site does well, Morgan said, was to "take a news story and build a community of debate around it".

It is the community that has developed around The Huffington Post and that has allowed it to grow into a powerful force in online news and commentary.

The Huffington Post has its niche in liberal and left-of-centre political, but it is a large niche that sees it compete on some levels with the likes of the Guardian, which with its bloggers and news, positions itself as the world's liberal voice.

As sites like The Huffington Post grow they can only further challenge established sites like The Guardian, among others.

Morgan acknowledges that when mainstream news sites have more visitors there is "a bigger opportunity" and that it is a "different brand from a mainstream brand".

Different, but with growing similarity, as the more sites like The Huffington Post and Gawker hire their own teams (Huffington now has 40 staff) to grow their audience, the more they resemble the old media, but they have the advantage of growing from a community base.

Site co-founder Kenneth Lerer admits as much when he said that the goal of The Huffington Post was to "do for internet news what CNN did for TV news". Of course CNN, along with the BBC, is trying to do for internet news what it has already done for TV news, like its much talked of Citizen Journalism initiative (aka social media and blogging).

Published Oct 02 2007, 03:03 PM by Gordon Macmillan

Filed under: Blogging, Huffingtonpost, social media, The Guardian

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