Personally, I’m not a fan of the Huffington Post. In addition to the fact that the site seems unnecessarily clunky, it strikes me as a really great example of opinion for the sake of opinion. With a few exceptions, most of the site’s “content” seems painfully clever. It reminds me of the Willamette Week, a Portland paper that’s a textbook example of what happens when the high school yearbook staff starts getting paid to crank out writing that can be classified as “edgy.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the writing, per se, in the Huffington Post (or “Huff Po” if you’re cool enough); it’s the tone of it. The word I’d use to describe it, if I were forced to pick just one, would be precious. I don’t like precious. In fact, I cannot stand precious.
That said, I do have a lot of respect for the Huffington Post. It’s an applause machine for so-called liberals, but at least it publishes “content” that does not appear to get vetted by the myth makers. And it was started, allegedly, by one person: a woman with an axe to grind. And grind it she has.
Now it belongs to AOL. And Arianna Huffington, who is about to be $333 million richer than she was this time last month, is back pedaling like nothing I’ve seen in a long while. She came on the PBS Newshour the other night along with her new pimp – excuse me, I mean boss – from AOL. I’ve listened to so many “execs” at technology companies spew forth absolute nonsense for so many years that it was instantly clear that this particular high tech “exec” is certainly in the right line of work. He talked about the stable of brands, about the new global reach of AOL. He talked about the tremendous creative talent at Huff Po, and he used the word “content” in almost every sentence. This rambling, content-void jackass is excited – excited! – about “content.” And he’s super excited about the opportunity to work with a trailblazer the likes of Arianna Huffington.
I can just imagine the PR team’s meeting the morning following the broadcast. I can imagine it because I’ve sat in more of these meetings than I care to count. A big company acquires a smaller one, not as an act of aggression, but, well, more like a romance. The acquisition, therefore, is a wedding. We joined hands because we love each other, so the script says, and it’s just such a natural fit that not becoming business partners, now that would be a story … I shudder to think how many PR people will be promoted during the next performance review season thanks to how “on message” their “execs” were.
One thing I have never experienced, on the other hand, is working on an acquisition that has a spokesperson as coachable as Arianna Huffington. Now that she’s got $333 million in her checking account, she all but scoffed at Jeffrey Brown’s suggestion that the Huff Po is known for its left-of-center editorial stance. Oh no! she said. There is so much more to the site than politics. There’s culture, there’s lifestyle, there are book reviews and entertainment. And there’s lots on Huff Po that’s local – or, as she says it, since lying is somehow more tolerable if it’s done with a European accent, “laaahhh kal.” As if she’d just inhaled a bump or two of something very expensive, as Jeffrey Brown looked as if he was trying to not react to a shadowy blur he’d just realized was in fact the tail of a rat dashing across the floor of the Newshour studio, Arianna Huffington explained that this new adventure is going to be really, really great for people who live in parts of the country where local news is a dying commodity. Why? you may wonder, given the “content aggregation” (that’s code talk for rerunning stories rather than creating anything original) and the global reach and so on and so forth. How? Simple: The new dynamic duo is going to empower local communities. That’s how.
