Longtime readers know that as each conference I host draws near, I invite you all to help me interview the luminaries who grace our stages. We’re one month out from this year’s CM Summit, and the lineup is incredible.
I’m working backwards through the keynote conversations, and the conference will end with Arianna Huffington, the founder and EIC of The Huffington Post.
Arianna’s creation is now a top ten news site, has serious backing from a major private equity fund, has innovated in social media integration, and just generally become the shorthand for successful publishing in the age of the real time web.
I’ve got a lot to talk about with Arianna, including:
– The future of journalism: Can the Huffington Post ever compete with the newsgathering prowess of, say, the NYT? Does it need to? What models of journalism does Arianna see coming that might be different from today’s?
– Revenue models: Can the Huffington Post cross into strong, consistent profitability? And how do its legions of unpaid contributors earn value from their contributions online?
– Point of View: What has made the Huffington Post so successful – is it the clear POV that the site endorses?
– Today’s poliitical scene: What does Arianna make of the Tea Party movement? Of the current political climate in the US?
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop and ask you to either Tweet it out with the #cmsummit hashtag or leave me a comment below, if you’re so inclined. Thanks!
Ask her why she has allowed her idea-driven and serious platform to be so completely overwhelmed by sensationalistic, trivial, tabloid, petty, silliness.
I know the answer is ‘pageviews’ but how can she justify all the false shock and outrage and celebrity nothingness that take up about 50% of the site space. There is great value in both the original ideas and aggregation they do, but it’s watered down with complete horseshit in a very sad way.
As John Stewart once said in a slightly different context, ‘you’re hurting us’. Why?
How does HP think about managing the costs of reporting. Reporting is expensive, yet it is one of the differentiators of journalism? Is old world reporting dead?
(1) Where will the innovation in ‘online content monetization’ (OCM) come from?
AOL? HuffPost? TechCrunch/GigaOm/TPM/Politico? NYT? WSJ? Or somebody not yet on the screen.
(2) What is the biggest revenue stream currently, and what the most underrated one, in OCM.
(3) How does she justify do pivot HuffPost several times from Politics/and blogs, to boobs, celebrities, sensationalism and aggregation.
Not to mention that it became a mainstream product, driven by getting more and more eyeballs by focusing on “what gets us more eyeballs?”
Instead of saying, how do we optimise revenue for the current product?