Michael Massing writes: “No one can feel secure,” said one Times reporter who had survived the cut. Her comment captured the climate of fear and insecurity that has gripped traditional news organizations in the digital era. “Disruption” is the catch-all phrase.
That digital technology is disrupting the business of journalism is beyond dispute. What’s striking is how little attention has been paid to the impact that technology has had on the actual practice of journalism. The distinctive properties of the Internet—speed, immediacy, interactivity, boundless capacity, global reach—provide tremendous new opportunities for the gathering and presentation of news and information.
The Huffington Post is undergoing an identity crisis. One of its initial core innovations—using content from elsewhere—has become so dominant as to nearly choke the site.
Arianna Huffington said that the site plans to end its relationship with the AP and build its own in-house news service, while “doubling down on original reporting and bringing together a new investigative team.” To head that team, The Huffington Post hired three former staff members of The New Republic—editors Greg Veis and Rachel Morris and writer Jonathan Cohn—to help “bring long-form journalism to a new audience.”
The Huffington Post has been down this road before. In 2009, it set up a nonprofit Investigative Fund with a staff of eleven and a budget of nearly $2 million, Within a year, the fund was folded into the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative outfit.
Huffington Post editors claim that these print-based imports proved a poor fit in an all-digital operation. Perhaps so, but the AOL deal seems to have been a Faustian bargain for the organization; in return for a huge pot of cash, it came under relentless pressure to turn a profit. The only way to do that was by increasing ad revenues, which in turn meant drawing more readers. That explains the site’s perpetual motion, nonstop expansion, and proliferation of sections. In its early years, The Huffington Post seemed on its way to defining a new type of digital journalism. Ten years on, it seems stuck in place, struggling to recapture the innovative spirit that had once defined it.
The same seems true of the first generation of digital news sites in general. After an initial burst of daring and creativity, they have entered a middle-aged lethargy.
These sites, which all seem to blend into one another, rarely break news or cause a commotion. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I was hoping to see one of them grab hold of the event and provide a forum for the many pressing questions raised—free speech versus hate speech, anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism, the state of religious tolerance and religious fanaticism in Europe. The State of Digital News
