
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to step down - grahamel
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37047416
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anders098
Huffington post if far from serious newspaper/media.They are yellow
journalism.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)
They exaggerates news in order to grab eyeballs. And their "liberal"
attributes biased their stances a lot too.

~~~
return0
I do not think anyone disputes that. Then again, in the copywriter's age,
yellow papers are bastions of journalism.

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pc86
> _Then again, in the copywriter 's age, yellow papers are bastions of
> journalism._

This might sound profound but it doesn't actually make any sense.

~~~
avn2109
I think the parent means that the vast majority of published material is
disguised native content such as "submarine" PR pieces, product placement,
unmodified press releases etc. Since the overall standards have sunk so low,
yellow journalism starts to look good by comparison.

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kartD
All her talk of integrity, and yet HuffPo writes articles on Uber while she
sits on their board. Where are the amazing journalists of our day? Where is
the modern day Murrow or Cronkite?

On another note does anyone know any good Indian journalists? Or is the term
an oxymoron :P ?

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losteverything
Where is the modern day Murrow or Cronkite?

All over. The trick is to find them.

Our world is so much better because newspapers matter less and so much worse
because cable matters more.

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catacombs
The world is much better off because newspapers matter less? I disagree.

From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Edward Snowden to the current water
crisis in Flint, newspapers have broken stories that've benefitted the public.
If any of you watch the news, a majority of stories are recycled from original
newspaper reporting. While papers' circulations are dwindling, they are still
making a difference online.

If no one is keeping our elected officials accountable, who will? Surely not
Dave and Kelly of News Channel whatever.

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losteverything
Less because the "publishable" population has gone from a few to almost
anybody. A smartphone is a personal publisher-editor-printer-distributor.

We do not have to rely on the newspaper to be the 1st ordinal of "news"

I can be a news seeker much easier now

Newspapers are important just less so than in 1976, say

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abakker
I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more.

Newspapers are far from being a distribution channel, and to think of them
that way is as reductive as thinking of social networks as address books.

Newspapers are organizations that are first and foremost investigative, backed
up by quality control, editorial, and research organizations. If you replace
this with a smartphone and shift the delivery model out from a newspaper, then
the role of being a fact-checker, editor, researcher, and expert falls on the
reader. This is a bad idea, not only because it creates more work for the
reader, but also because it increase the extent to which personal bias of the
readership can increase the incorrect interpretation of facts.

Obviously, no newspaper is a perfect example of this ideal, but they are a
great deal further along the curve than almost any individual. As a result,
they act as a force against filter bubbles by promoting a whole set of stories
and ideas that force people to participate more broadly with real world events
and ideas. The mere fact that we worry so much about editorial bias in
newspapers is a symptom of the importance that they play in guiding their
consumers. The solution is not self-guidance and self-filtering and self
research in order to wade through a sea of unqualified, unedited BS.

Furthermore, by being a news seeker, you are admitting that you are still
seeking to know what is out there? Is there a particular reason you do not
want to consume news through a qualified source? If you want to read the
panama papers by yourself then you will likely do that to exclusion of all
other reading for a period of days to weeks, and you will need to spend twice
that doing research to understand what it means. If you go through a
newspaper, they do that work for you.

Newspapers are not broken in any fundamental way. The only reason that this
discussion is even happening is that news was traditionally funded by
advertising, and that advertising is a shifting business, dragging news along
with it. Discussions that center on the decline of newspapers without
acknowledging that the shift in advertising revenue is really the problem
ignores something very important: that the business of generating news is not
at fault, the business of paying for it is. That is the real discussion worth
having.

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losteverything
Beautifully said!! wish I wasn't working to comment more.

Newspapers aren't just about news. I may choose to consume one investigative
report every quarter, say, and am grateful there's a qualified source .
Weather travel planning, for sale, advertisements, and government
notifications I no longer need a newspaper to get.

We used to buy the Sunday Times just for the Travel section to look at
advertisements. We're better off now that we have the internet to find deals

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oldmanjay
I'm sure she feels like she's done enough to destroy discourse on the internet
and she has her sights set on destroying some other vital pillar of our
civilization to increase her personal fortune further.

~~~
swalsh
Ha, there are just some people where the world would just be a better place if
they had less drive.

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acjohnson55
I was an engineer at HuffPost. I believe the departure of Arianna is going to
have a huge impact on the organization. Whether that's net positive or
negative, only time will tell.

Many of the company's significant initiatives seemed to come out in
unpredictable bursts from the brain trust that formed Arianna's staff. The
nominal product and engineering leadership was charged with implementing these
initiatives, but subject to rapidly changing priorities. A lot of work was
launched under time pressure and then scrapped shortly afterward.

To be fair, a lot of the instincts behind those priorities were pretty
ambitious and forward-thinking. But totally disconnected from the work of
implementation. There's an opportunity to retain the positive aspects that
kept HuffPost on the cutting edge (at least in some ways) and reform the churn
and top-down approach. Or maybe the road is clear for the company to be fully
assimilated into the Verizonscape.

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gwern
I guess all her compensation finally vested.

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gtrubetskoy
I'm beginning to think that "corporate and consumer well-being and
productivity" might be the next big thing, and it's already here. There are
incredible opportunities in this space, like biohacking, supplements, self-
testing (blood, brain function, etc), computer-assisted learning and
meditation, diets and just plain old food a level beyond "organic" (i.e. known
origin, local, glyphosate free soil, "grass fed" etc).

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splawn
Awesome, In that case, I will start breeding snakes for their oil.

~~~
swalsh
I hear snake oil is the new coconut oil.

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ZoF
One of the least biased media sources on the internet :^)

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spriggan3
You forgot the /s somewhere in your sentence /s . In the age of bloggers AS
journalists because paying real ones is what online media doesn't do (the
Huffpo doesn't pay its contributors, nor its interns) , there is very little
journalism left on the internet which is a paradox, considered we are drowned
with "news" .

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travisby
I think `^` was a pinocchio nose -- implying a lie.

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
That is not the meaning of :^)

:^) indicates that a joke is being made. It's quite similar to TwitchTV's
Kappa, if you know about that.

~~~
ry_ry
Kappa is actually quite an interesting phenomenon - the fluid state of meme-
emoticons and the ebb and flow of their popularity in relation to seemingly
unconnected events is a nuanced topic in its own right.

Nothing to do with huffpost tho. Kappa

