Can't Buy Me Cred
The big news in the 'sphere today is the launch of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's project to gather together a menagerie of celebrities, media types, politicos, and even apparently a few "regular" people to blog. There are rumored to be over THREE HUNDRED contributors signed on to this effort. There are big names in this bunch, and, even though most of these would be bloggers hail from the Left side of the aisle, there are a couple of noted conservatives as well.
In order to help cut through the clutter the site has a "Featured Posts" section, which is designed to highlight the best of the field. There also is a "News Wire", which has links to breaking news and a large cross section of news sources.
Design wise it looks and feels pretty good. It's not overloaded with graphics and is easy to navigate and read. There doesn't seem to be a way to read all the posts by a specific author yet, although maybe that will be available as more material is posted.
But good looks only get you so far in the blogging racket (with the mysterious exception of Wonkette). For at the end of the day, most readers would agree that content is indeed king (Why else would this guy be getting heavy traffic?).
And the content at The Huffington Post is a decidedly mixed bag. I know that it's extremely early to be making such judgments, but I don't see how this amalgamation of "talent" is possibly going to work. Sure, I have enough morbid curiosity to read one post by Ellen DeGeneres on the gubamint turning wild horses into cat food, but am I going to keep coming back day after day for this?
Yes, there's an post on Yalta by well known historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that I might be interested in reading. But how much ridiculous crap (like this uninformed, unfunny post on gay marriage by the husband and wife team of Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Brad Hall) must I wade through to get to the good stuff? From the looks of it so far, way too much.
The other reason that I don't believe that The Huffington Post is going to succeed is the way that it's been created. Rather than building from the ground up, this is yet another effort to try to skip most of the development process and launch a finished product. When I read things like this:
Huffingtonpost.com has a dozen investors, from her partner Ken Lerer, a former AOL Time Warner executive, to Larry David. The site, which has seven paid staffers, including a former Matt Drudge researcher, will sell advertising, and Tribune Media plans to syndicate weekly highlights.
and this:
"The great thing about blogging is that your thoughts don't have to have a beginning, middle and end," says Huffington, arguing that famous folks are usually too busy to craft an op-ed piece. "You can just put a thought out there in the cultural bloodstream."
I can't help but compare it to the arrogance and unfounded optimism that greeted the launch of Air America.
You can almost see the same sort of thought process taking place.
"This whole talk radio/blogging thing can't be that difficult. If we just get some big names, an organization, and funding, we can do it even better than these schmucks who have succeeded in it already."
It didn't work for Air America and I doubt if it will work for The Huffington Post either. Like Air America, I don't think that The Huffington Post will disappear completely. With the funding and sheer number of contributors, it would hard to imagine that it could crash and burn anytime soon. It will linger on for some time as a marginal player, and, also like Air America, will be a source for plenty of fodder for bloggers like us with a penchant for mockery. Welcome aboard.
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