I’m speechless.

Does Kurtz have the balls to cover this media story? No. It’s above his pay grade. Meal ticket employees, every one of them.

That’s why we are so offended by Froomkin’s ouster, because he is a principled journalist and that’s something his peers just don’t understand – these meal ticket employees (Dana Priest and others excluded.)

I’m wondering if Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns a big chunk of WaPoo stock, will ever break his “hands off” policy and dump this cratering investment.

Buffett was big buddies with Katherine Graham and famously “helped” her when she had to take over the Post upon her husband’s suicide. He’s also smart enough to see that Junior has driven it off the cliff.

My hope is that Buffett’s business smarts will prompt him to get off his duff and sell those WaPoo shares.

Kind of interesting how the traffic in the Quantcast graph mirrors the trends in the lower two graphs, even though they don’t measure exactly the same things.

Also interesting to look at trends using the contributors of each of the opinion pages at WaPo and NYT — just try it yourself and see.

– Go to http://www.google.com/trends
– Use any five of the following folks from the editorial stables (Trends can only compare five at a time):

NYT: gail collins, bob herbert, roger cohen, paul krugman, david brooks, maureen dowd, tom friedman, nicholas kristof, frank rich

WaPo: dan froomkin, richard cohen, george will, david ignatius, charles krauthammer, george will, e. j. dionne, eugene robinson

Mix and match them around a couple of times. You will notice in the results that some of the folks draw ‘0′, some draw much higher scores, and the scores will be relative to whom you are comparing at any one pass. But you will notice that a few names consistently come up with ‘0′ or awfully close to it.

Some of the results are intuitive; at competitor NYT, you’ll see that Paul Krugman is a superman when it comes to traffic, and that Friedman and Dowd are unfortunate rainmakers as well, but for different reasons.

At WaPo, however, the rainmakers are very, very different from what we might intuit; more importantly, the ‘0′ scores are still on board, have not been dropped in spite of their consistent inability to draw traffic.

David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson — all of them less than stellar performers when it comes to generating traffic according to the Trend graphs. Why haven’t they been cut?

And cheese-on-rice, why the hell is Charles Krauthammer such a traffic draw??

Because these people are syndicated, that’s why. The acceptable, old-school liberals like Dionne and Cohen, the well-connected Ignatius, the neo-con mouthpiece Krauthammer, all of them are members of the Washington Post Writers Group, WPO’s outlet for their syndicated contributors. Krauthammer draws traffic because his work has been widely disbursed to other newspaper outlets (and thereby propelling more widely his neo-conservative bullshit).

Who’s not a member of WaPo’s syndicated contributors?

Dan Froomkin, the lone dirty fricking hippie blogger.

The rest of the team are all die-hard brick-and-mortar old-school newspaper guys.

WaPo cut Froomkin for low traffic, reducing access to his work on line, but while promoting the work of the rest of their non-blogger organization.

Using those kinds of measures for making management decisions means we’ll continue to see more of that ignorant, braying jackass Krauthammer — and that WaPo will continue to rely more heavily on non-newspaper income to keep them afloat.

In other words, WaPo is a dead newspaper walking.

[edit: damn, I think my comment was an Oxdown post, hmm?]

Well, when the NYTimes and Washington Post implement their paywall that they’re colluding on, that’ll fix HuffPo’s wagon. No way will it, with freely-accessible content that people want to read, ever be able to compete with pay-per-view content catering to a narrower and narrower audience.

Oh wait, maybe I understand things now. The dying newspapers are hoping to go to a subscription model to bilk their wealthy old white guy audience. Sure, the readership collapses, but that doesn’t mean revenues have to wane. Just keep hiking the subscription fees! I’m sure there are a dozen or two CEOs willing to pay thousands of dollars per year each to read those newspapers. Right?

Great analysis. The numbers don’t lie.

Great comment, thanks.

Had no idea Buffett was invested in the WaPoo.

I’m sure someone will forward him Jane’s analysis.

I have had the Washington Post bookmarked for years. I read (past tense) it everyday. Last week I removed it and haven’t gone to the site since. I’m tired of Hiatt. I’m tired of his editorials. I’m tired of his business decisions. The paper is not worth reading anymore.

Any ideas where Froomkin ends up? HuffPo seems too obvious….dunno.

Any trend lines for Donald Grahams stewardship of WaPo?

It won’t be Huffpo – which is Israeli-Occupied Territory (financing is very Neocon-centric).

FWIW, Berkhire Hathaway was crushed in 2008.

Please note that the Washington Post is currently running a “send in your video of your dog doing tricks” contest. Seriously. No, I mean, really. The Washington Post cannot be taken seriously.

From one of Dan’s co-workers at the WAPO:

(He better watch his back…)

* Farewell to Dan Froomkin, one of the blogging pioneers at The Post and a man whose traffic numbers regularly made me want to jump into the Potomac. (White House Watch, Politico)

Now, that doesn’t quite sound like a blog where interest had “diminished”, now does it?

Jane–thanks for the data. it seems like years since people were discussing matters on the basis of facts and statistics. (sadly, it has been years.)

i hope that you’re not holding HuffPo up as some kind of example of an independent and responsible blog.

>>When Arianna nabbed $25 million from Oak Investment Partners, of Palo Alto, California, she was acquired by a financial network that also has significant investments in the Israeli arms industry – an industry, I might add, directly subsidized and controlled by the Israeli government. For example, Oak Investment has invested in IET/Intelligent Electronics, now morphed into Clickservice Software, an Israeli-based company that makes sophisticated weapons systems and sells them to clients such as “an unnamed Far Eastern country.” Oak Investment partner Fred Harman now sits on the Huffington Post’s board.

Case closed. Mystery solved.

Since Arianna is so into “truth,” how about a little when it comes to how she’s financing a $25 million media gig that still refuses to pay bloggers! Not only that, but they were recently forced to apologize to a Chicago media outlet for brazenly stealing content. Whatever her contributions to the journalistic profession, let alone the pursuit of “truth,” Arianna is sure giving tackiness a bad name.

source: http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13990

How did this slip past Arainna into the HuffPo?

On Israeli Settlement Freeze, Public Has Obama’s Back

she’s been working on her blindspot:

The couple divorced in 1997, and in 1998 Michael Huffington revealed that he was bisexual.[4] A 1999 magazine article claimed that Arianna Huffington “entered the marriage… with full knowledge of Michael Huffington’s sexual interests in men”

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_Huffington

The second graph is especially pleasing because L’il Debbie talked about why circulation was down before she departed the WaPo. Her explanations annoyed me because she talked about technology, which the WaPo doesn’t control. The WaPo does control its ideology, which struck me as being far too neoconservative-friendly. It’s nice to see that the neo-con friendly paper has gotten financially clobbered over the last several years while the more even-handed NY Times has been rolling along nicely.

HuffPo came up because I mentioned the comparison to Jane yesterday, when trying to show what a comparable newspaper (NYT) and a popular online news site (HuffPo) are doing in terms of traffic, and how the numbers suggest problems which have NOTHING to do with Froomkin.

You can argue all you want about funding, but we could have similar arguments about nearly every single major news outlet in this country. The point here is that the largest newspaper in the US on the internet, and the largest online news outlet are appropriate benchmarks against which we should measure WaPo’s performance.

There may be a curious parallel here. The WaPo,long the major print media voice of the nation’s capitol, is attempting to commit the same suicide of increasing irrelevance that the government itself seems to be working on. Now that Froomkin is gone, if they will make John Boehner the editor in chief, put Biden in charge of the business section, give McConnel the metro section, put Pelosi in charge of the gossip column and let Harry Reid write the TV and movie reviews, then the intellectual, politicial and cultural devastation will be complete. Granted that the newspapers are dying,but the WaPo seems to be aspiring to be one of the first in the cemetary.

thanks for the context. yet if all that we are talking about here is numbers and not quality of content then i’m not sure of the relevance. in my book HuffPo is papparazzi news. it is the epitome of everything that i learned to hate about the transformation of news into info-tainment. after the bush felons the standard for quality news went even lower–crashing all the way into the dog-house (literally).

“new media,” as Arianna so belatedly refers to it, is a relatively new kind of beast. to me credibility and consistency of supposed factual information are essential. next, which is where almost all american media sources fail miserably, is the depth and nuance of the coverage. news in america is not only often error-filled but also so superficial as to seem retarded (especially during and after the BushCheney regime). another key to quality news is their independence. HuffPo, according to Justin Raimondo, is compromised in its ability to report unbiasedly. Although Raimondo’s blog has become increasingly “rightest” after the rise of Obama, his credibility of reportage during the Bush years were noteworthy. (remember that was when all of them major news outlets were badly compromised by the BushCheney felons.)

Arianna seems to be rather peripheral to HuffPo: her contributions, from my perspective, seem marginal. Look at how many posts Jane has published just today: it’s like 3 weeks worth of Arianna.

Lastly, is it true that bloggers don’t get paid at HuffPo? If so, i would discourage any self-respecting commenter or blogger from holding that paparazzi rag up as an example of what a good blog is like.

Let’s all be careful we are not getting played to build buzz for a sale of dear ol’ HuffPo. That story has been out there in the ether for days – here’s the blast at Gawker - yet no one here seems to have noted the possibility.

The traffic numbers are, doubtlessly, accurate. But, the whole story seems crafted a bit to appeal to the prospective buyer.

Caveat lector, is all I’m saying.

Okay, let’s just get it out on the table here instead of beating around the bush that you have a beef with HuffPo, to the point where you aren’t able to do critical analysis of what they are doing right, only what they are doing wrong in your opinion.

I have different opinion, having worked in new media. While I’m not the target demographic of HuffPo, I’m also not the target demographic for American Idol or Survivor or many other pop culture programs which combine entertainment with a reality component and audience participation. It’s hard to argue with the popularity of such programming, and it’s a similar audience which finds HuffPo popular as well.

Sandwiched in between the fluffy celebrity commentary and paparazzi fluff is real news which might not otherwise reach that same audience; they don’t sit around watching the 6pm or 11pm news, after all. They will make time for content which is authentic and engaging and in real time.

I’ll point to Nico Pitney’s liveblogging of events in Iran as quality news which even mainstream media professionals have admired; Nico was far ahead of most national outlets, even days after the election. This is just one example of news which a platform like HuffPo can support and other outlets can’t.

As for Arianna: her role at her organization isn’t that of content creator, never really has been. She’s been an executive all along as editor-in-chief. In that kind of role I’d expect her to shape the overall brand of the site more than create content. In contrast, Jane was a content creator from the first day she started this blog, even though she’s assumed a more executive capacity at this site over time. Although they were both born in the same decade, there’s a nearly a generational shift between Arianna and Jane as well, like that between Boomers and Gen X, which influenced their experiences and how they use and react to technology and politics. This play some role in how they position themselves within their respective sites.

And I also caution you about the blogging-for-pay as a criteria for generating quality content. One can’t swing a stick without hitting quality citizen journalists and opinion bloggers who don’t get paid much or at all at many kinds of outlets, which doesn’t diminish the work they do. What many contributors paid and unpaid can expect at HuffPo is enormous traffic they would not otherwise receive for their work, and in turn help push the mainstream media to play catch up and do their job.

See my comment at (18). I’m not about to build buzz for HuffPo’s sale unless Arianna wants to cut me in on a percentage.

Take a look at Quantcast’s top sites listing and look at which news/blogging sites are most popular in terms of traffic. CNN may rank higher (31) than either NYTimes (63) or HuffPo (76), but CNN is not a newspaper site nor is it a blog-news site, which WaPo (154) is or has tried to be.

I didn’t pick USAToday (111) because it’s a national newspaper and WaPo has not really tried to compete in that market, choosing instead to syndicate contributors’ content to local newspapers nationally.

thanks for your informed response. i’d read HuffPo from its inception till about six months ago and i believe that the quality of information offered up has fallen so far, according to my standards, that i do not consider it at all anymore when i am looking for quality information.

what my point was in terms of not paying bloggers for their work wasn’t in relation to you get what you pay for, but more a matter of common human decency.

how much does Arianna make a year? if i worked for a living as a blogger, i would not want it to be standard fare that my contributions were not deserving of a reasonable remuneration.

“Slave Labor: The New, New Media Profit Model”
Foster Kamer, gawker.com

http://gawker.com/5299052/slav…..ofit-model

As a former managing editor for an online news site I can tell you that I have agreed to have content cross-posted at HuffPo — that’s content HuffPo didn’t pay for. But the blogger/journo who generated the content was compensated by another outlet, and their work received the kind of promotion that their outlet would not otherwise have gotten.

For this reason I think you need to do more homework on the remuneration.

Really.

And if you’re going to use that as a rule of thumb, then you need to ask other outlets how much they pay their people, too.

(BTW, they be great regurgitators Gawker’s not exactly a source I’d have let any of my team use as a primary source.)

Okay, now I’m annoyed. I went back and read the links embedded in the Gawker piece — highly editorial opinion-laden piece, by the way — and it’s nothing but a pissing war.

First, the author bashes GuestOfAGuest.com’s Rachelle Hruska for not paying staff, yet conveniently misses these facts clearly laid out in the NYT’s profile of Hruska: “Ms. Griffith, with other Hamptons interns, works for food and gas, living rent-free in a three-story home with two acres of beachfront property and a pool, owned by a friend of Ms. Hruska’s.”

INTERNS. Get it? it’s very common for interns not to be compensated; they receive experience they would otherwise have a difficult time getting, and in this case, the gig comes with accomodations, food and partying? Jeebus. I’d have been only too tickled to find such a deal in my college days, especially during a deep recession. (Just how much is rent for the summer in the Hamptons anyhow?)

ASSME, which is cited in the Gawker piece and is bent out of shape about Hruska’s non-payment of interns, is the American Society of Shit-canned Media Elites. In other words, disgruntled former media employees who are likely looking for paid work in a glutted market. What exactly do you think they are going to say?

Secondly, with regard to Gawker’s whining about HuffPo’s business model: do you actually see any information in that post where Gawker called Arianna and asked her about her business model? do you see where they asked anybody in management at HuffPo about their compensation policy – who gets paid and for what?

And Gawker pays for that kind of content? I’d have kicked it back at any team member who submitted it to me without clearly labeling it as [OPINION] first and without getting feedback directly from HuffPo.

May I suggest when reading content that you ask, “What’s the agenda, and who’s agenda is it?” It’s not like Gawker wouldn’t be in competition with HuffPo, would they, and hurting from the downturn in the economy along with a glut of competition?

Just as I thought.

- HuffPo not for sale yet, but reformulating with injection of venture capital;

- (61) paid staff, including (5) paid reporters, has recently issued raises to the chagrin of other media outlets, and is preparing to expand to local sites;

- Arianna explains HuffPo’s pay policy in this video. Which begs the question: when people are willing to bid as much as $13,500 in a charity auction for an internship (see first link this comment), why pay for non-journalist (often celebrity) bloggers?