Tag Archives: chuffpo

Huffington Post needs an intern; copy-and-paste experts need no longer apply

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I regret that too often this blog is replete* with bomb-throwing posts directed at just a few targets. Even I think “Move your needle to a different groove, son.” But sometimes it’s just too easy:

AdAge: Someone Bids $13,000 for Huffington Post Internship

I don’t know what the job description is, but it most certainly does not include re-publishing reviews from local publications…anymore.

Hey, do I at least get points for doing something constructive? Truth be told, The Chicago Media Future Conference is why this blog has languished as of late. But on the plus side, we’re close to announcing our full slate of panelists, and we already have some interesting posts up about SEO, unbundling content and the Trib’s new Chicago Now project. Head on over there and check it out, and sign-up for the conference if you’re so inclined. It’s free!

* Confidential to Chris Jones: This is the proper use of this word.

Arianna on ChuffPo’s plagiarism: "The intern did it."

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This week, Time.com published a piece by Belinda Luscombe about Arianna Huffington. It’s one of the few profiles of her that addresses the plagiarism (Time’s word for it, not mine) that the Chicago branch of Huffington Post (or ChuffPo) engaged in last year. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons, including the new spin Huffington is putting on the issue (2nd page):

In December the site’s Chicago section was found to have been plagiarizing. “This was a problem with an intern,” says Huffington. “There was no excuse, and we corrected it.”

Really? An intern? That’s your excuse? Where have I heard that before…? Oh I know!

When I thought about what to write for The Huffington Post I was stuck on the idea of writing about the Huffington Post, because that’s who broke the Cindy McCain story where she, or an intern her people say, lifted recipes from the Food Network’s web site and put them on John McCain’s web site as her own “favorite family recipes.”

[SNIP]

So thank you to The Huffington Post for looking out for the busy, the overworked, and the overheated chefs in America.

Yeah, Arianna Huffington is a regular Norma Rae.

Now, I’m not saying Huffington is lying here but here’s what Wired’s Ryan Singel was told about it in December 2008:

The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti says the contretemps are overblown — that the complete re-printing was a mistaken editorial call and that The Huffington Post’s intention in aggregating other publications’ content is to send traffic their way.

Wow, what incredible freedom Huffington Post interns have! They get to make editorial judgment calls about the content of one of the most-read Web sites in the country! No wonder people will work for them for free!

The Time article also summarizes the SEO methods HuffPo uses to create a competitive advantage over the sites whose content it uses. Luscombe says these methods as “complicated and mostly secret,” which is only half-right. They ARE complicated, but not at all secret if you’re hiring the right SEO experts.

In the article, Huffington says the trade-off is all the pageviews that she sends the way of the sites from which they take content. If my time as Web Editor of Time Out Chicago is any indication of the traffic other sites are getting, the number of page views we received from the reviews they lifted was minimal. And it’s hardly worth the loss of ad revenue from search engine traffic. Back to the article:

While this is wily, it’s legal. But news organizations may not tolerate others cherry-picking their content and repurposing it for profit for much longer. “Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post,” says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. “It’s not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it’s about the value.” There are other aggregators, but HuffPo is the most tempting. “It’s a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line” between fair and unfair use of copy, Benton notes. [Emphasis mine]

The sad thing is, there’s an ethical way to aggregate. And ChuffPo’s actions – intern or otherwise – have soured many big media types on the idea of it, when it really could be a boon for their sites.

HuffPo’s Jonathan Peretti thinks Web editors are idiots

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I mentioned in my last post that I wasn’t as upset as the Chicago Reader’s Whet Moser was about ChuffPo – the Chicago branch of the larger Huffington Post site – stealing content from local publications. Mainly because everything ChuffPo does is slapdash so it was hardly surprising that their ethics were, too, and the resulting direct harm seemed minimal.

Until someone in the comments at Chicagoland pointed out that ChuffPo’s Bon Iver page with the stolen content was coming up higher in a Google search for “Bon Iver Vic” than the Reader’s page (the source of the stolen content). You can see that here (3rd and 4th main links).

So there was the direct harm laid bare. And HuffPo’s reaction to their questionable behavior dialed up my ire.

Wired picked up the story, and spoke with HuffPo co-founder Jonah Peretti, who admitted that they made a “mistaken editorial call.” And to the site’s credit, they are no longer publishing the full content, and are instead excerpting it the way every other aggregator site does.

But the other comments attributed to him in the story show he still doesn’t get it. Excerpts from the Wired story in ital below, my comments following:

The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti says the contretemps are overblown — that the complete re-printing was a mistaken editorial call and that The Huffington Post’s intention in aggregating other publications’ content is to send traffic their way.

“You tease, you pull out a piece of it, and then you have a headline or link out,” Peretti said. “Generally publishers are psyched to have a link.”

And yes, that is what they did. And no one – Whet, me or any other Web Ed – begrudges anyone else who does this. I love when people excerpt our content, credit us and add a link. Hell, we even allow for some image use so long as the credit’s given to the photog.

But as Whet’s pointed out (read Update III in this post), what ChuffPo was doing was not aggegrating. It was re-publishing without permission then selling ads on that content. It’s hard to put this in print terms because the Web is so different in its approach. But the generally accepted notion is when you aggregate, you excerpt. And ChuffPo was re-printing entire previews.

Did they send traffic our way? Yes, some. But it was minimal. The greater crime here was in establishing a competitive advantage vis a vis SEO traffic, which means any traffic they did send our way was superseded by their higher Google search rankings (which equals more traffic).

(The more I write about this, the more I wonder why I wasn’t more pissed off. Note to self: When something like this happens in the future, throw a ball against a wall Toby Ziegler-style until you think it all the way through.)

Anyway, back to the Wired article:

The headlines on The Huffington Post, he points out, link to the outside site, not to The Huffington Post page with the two to three paragraph excerpt of the other site’s copyrighted story. That page is accessible via the comment and “Quick Read” links, and serves as the “anchor” page for comments or for follow-up reporting by The Huffington Post staff.

Almost all of the readers click on the headlines and photos, according to Peretti, which means most don’t know the excerpt page exists since they get sent to the original site.

Then why have those pages at all? Again, it’s all about the SEO, baby. Peretti’s being disingenuous here. He knows that people will find those pages via Google, which accounts for a significant portion of his site’s traffic. Just because it happens off the main page, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Also, to suggest that users don’t know those pages exist because they only link to the QuickRead or Comment sections, particularly since HuffPo has vigorous commenters, is also disingenuous.

He compares The Huffington Post’s influence on other sites traffic to that of link-voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Those sites, along with Google News and Slashdot, rely on small excerpts or user submitted summaries of online content in order to create lists of the best new content on the web.

First of all, don’t flatter yourself, sir. The effects of ChuffPo on our traffic are minimal compared to sites like Digg, Reddit or Fark. The competitive advantage they’re creating for themselves far outweighs the tens of weekly pageviews we get from their site.

Also, the operative words here are “small excerpts” and “user submitted summaries.” Note that HuffPo was neither printing small excerpts or user submitted summaries.

But Peretti says some 95 percent of The Huffington Post’s traffic goes through the headline links, and that when The Huffington Post does original reporting or adds to a story, it changes a headline link to point to its content.

That 95 percent number is hazy and here’s why: It suggests that a very small percentage of HuffPo traffic reaches those pages with the stolen content, which is supposed to diminish the ire that Whet and others have over their practices. “Hey, it’s only 5 percent of our traffic! Why are you getting so upset?”

But what Peretti probably means is 95 percent of the traffic from the HuffPo/Chuffpo home pages clicks through the headline links. That’s a big difference. The real question is how much pf a percentage of their overall traffic do they get by using SEO strategies to get click throughs from search engines?

As for disgruntled publishers, Peretti seems genuinely perplexed and says The Huffington Post links should be good for them — and suggests that upset editors get in touch and build relationships with Huffington Post editors.

Yeah, silly us. We should have predicted they’d steal our content and called them pre-emptively to ask them to instead enter into a business relationship with us.

I have some Christmas shopping to do this afternoon. I think I’ll just steal a couple things, and if a retailer gets upset about it, I’ll suggest to them they get in touch with me and ask me to become a paying customer instead.

I think I’m out and then….

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I thought I was done talking about Chuffpo here until Whet, who is the Web Editor at the Reader, noticed that ChuffPo has been running blurbs and writeups from the Reader, TOC, Centerstage, Decider and others. Whet explains it all in posts here and here:

I’ve known this for a while, and perhaps it’s hurbis on my part, but I find everything ChuffPo does, from the top down, to be substandard so I have a hard time getting worked up about anything it does. The original content it features is from writers who either do better work elsewhere or do crap work altogether, the attribution they use is so disguised it might as well not exist (if even Roger Ebert’s confused then what should we expect from other readers), and it has no original voice or outlook of its own. Since the site’s had minimal impact locally, I figure whoever’s reading it doesn’t know any better, is attracted by nothing by the name and the site will eventually wither away.

I don’t know anyone in Chicago who says “Yeah, I really like ChuffPo. It’s an interesting read.” Everyone who ever mentions it is doing so with ire raised (whether its about its aggregation strategy, its practice of not paying its writers*, its habit of not posting critical comments, etc.). The last time I heard anyone mention anything about a post** from any of its writers was during the whole Steve Dolinsky*** kerfuffle and again – ire raised.

All this explains why I haven’t been as worked up about it as Whet. It’s been lousy from Day One, and continues to be lousy. It doesn’t seem to be doing direct harm to TOC and since any given day hands me a solid list of things that do (or potentially might), my focus ends up there. Is it wrong they’re running whole writeups from other, better publications? Yes. Would I join in a call for them to change their attribution/linking/aggregation strategies? Yes. Is it its worst crime? Arguably, no.

But perhaps it’s worth taking a stand against this due to the theory of the slippery slope. If a site like Chuffpo – which uses other publications’ content to acquire millions of dollars in financing that could be spent on more responsible media sites – can get away with something like this, what’s to stop any other site from doing the same. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being an aggregator of content, but Whet makes a compelling argument that ChuffPo’s way is the wrong way to do it (a.k.a. flat-out stealing), especially if they’re making money off it.

So perhaps tomorrow I’ll ask for some of that money back.

* A practice I defend, in part, here.
** Technically, the last time I heard anyone mention anything about a ChuffPo post was when Mike Doyle wrote about the CTA’s plan to eject the homeless from its cars. But that was originally a post Doyle wrote for his own site Chicago Carless, which proves its writers save their best work for other places (or cross-post it).
*** Who’s no longer writing for them, it seems.

Ben Eason encourages not-so-creative loafing

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Earlier this week, Creative Loafing, the parent company of alt-weeklies like Washington D.C.’s City Paper and the Chicago Reader, filed for bankruptcy. The go-to source for the background on this is this story in Atlanta magazine.

How this will affect the Reader remains to be seen, but this excerpt doesn’t bode well:

In fact, in his memo to employees, Eason said he wants to “get us quickly to a daily publishing web company that happens to have a weekly print publication that is a reference point for the web.” To staffers, Eason has been holding up the Huffington Post’s Chicago website as a model. It has one employee, who essentially sifts through every media outlet in Chicago for the best stories and then links to them. He’s a filter of content, but not a creator of one. Eason is in awe of the model.

Eason sees his papers doing something similar, but it “doesn’t mean we give up on original content.”

I know as well as anyone how difficult it is to make a site feel vibrant on a daily basis, when it’s largely dependent on weekly content. And I’m glad that linking to external sites is no longer seen (by most, anyway) as the great traffic-killer it once was. But remaking your site into a blog of blogs in order to do it, isn’t the answer.

First, that kind of curation takes time. When you link to a site, you’re essentially telling your readers “This is worth your time” unless context says otherwise. It requires reading, reporting and analysis, not just random posting alongside a pretty picture. You can say it won’t take away from writing and producing original content, but unless you expand your staff – and most newspapers and magazines aren’t in a position to do that – it’s a zero-sum game. If I had the kind of talented staff that Eason has at his disposal (and at TOC, we do), I’d rather have my writers working on providing more analysis and reporting.

Which brings me back again to Chuffpo.

When you do what ChuffPo does, you need to link to the heater stories, the ones that get people clicking. But when you do that, you end up repeating much of what people find elsewhere, which robs your site of distinction. So you need to provide your readers with something they can’t get elsewhere. Again, I’m not saying that being an aggregator of content is a bad idea. Some of the sites I read on a daily basis do just that. But my appetite for sites like that is limited. At this point, I don’t find myself needing another one, particularly one that doesn’t seem to have its own voice. (Despite my clear obsession with it, ChuffPo still hasn’t made it into my RSS feed.)

To be fair, ChuffPo does publish original content – of questionable veracity and quality – but it’s largely dependent on writers from other publications, who can depend on their full-time gigs for income. The only reason this model works is because the Huffington name can lure those folks to post for free and the Huffington money can bankroll it through any rough ad waters. It’s not a model that one should adopt in favor of something that already works. I can’t speak to the other Creative Loafing properties, but the Reader already has several blogs I consider daily destinations that are more akin to the spirit of blogging than anything I see on ChuffPo. (Their attribution tactics alone confuse even the sharpest readers, Roger Ebert, for example.)

Eason does have a point though: Readers ARE interested in what their favorite writers read. But the reason that interest is stoked in the first place is because their writers ARE writing. They get a sense of what these people are like through their analysis and the topics they cover. It makes them want to know more.

Plus, the tools to do these sort of things – direct your readers to what your writers are reading – already exist with sites like Delicious and GoodReads (in fact, the TOC blog contains links to both for our Eat Out and Books editors, respectively).

When ChuffPo launched, I said that Chicago didn’t need more sites that do the same old thing. It needed sites that cover topics that aren’t covered elsewhere, backed up by pick-up-the-phone reporting and good writing. (We’ll be getting more of that when Eater and Curbed finally launch next week.) At some point, if everyone’s linking, but no one’s producing original content…well, there won’t be much worth linking to anymore.

ChuffPo, comments and interns

Internet,

When I started at TOC, one of the first things I did was allow the blog to accept comments. They hadn’t yet done this because it was a can of worms no one wanted to open, I suppose.

In an ideal world, we’d have a system that requires someone to create a profile before they comment on our site. The reasons why we don’t do this involve a lot of issues that aren’t germane to this post, but suffice it to say, this is how I’d do it if we had unlimited resources.

In fact, I think most sites should operate this way. If you want to comment, you create a profile. Even people with assumed names tend to take responsibility for the persona they’re creating. It doesn’t mean you won’t have any assholes, just fewer. It’s not just personal opinion either, as other sites find this helps make their content better, and foster community.

But since we don’t have profiles, I moderate every comment that gets posted on the site. I’m pretty lenient with what gets posted, but anything that comes across as a personal attack on the writer or another commenter won’t go up. And anything that I deem to be (as our comment policy states) “just plain nasty” doesn’t go up. Is it subjective? Yes. But I’m generally pro-comments and wouldn’t ever think of not posting something just because it was critical of the content of a post, even if it was my own. (For proof, check out the comments on this Liz Phair review I wrote back in June.)

In a side note on yesterday’s post, I mentioned how Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films said some of her less-than-positive-but-still-constructive comments weren’t posted. The Beachwood Reporter also printed letters from those who dared to fact-check the mighty John Cusack (ahem) and found their comments similarly blocked. Now, granted, these are all comments from the readers of one site, so there may be a bit of an echo chamber at work here. (That’s no slam on the usually-fine work of the Beachwood or its readers – of which I am one – just an acknowledgment of a small sample size). Even so, Kevin Allman looked at ChuffPo’s commenting policy and found that – to put it mildly – it seems to be rather broadly enforced. Especially since an off-topic comment on HuffPo is as easy to find as a drunk at quarter draft night.

Now, the funny thing is, ChuffPo has a profile system. So you’d think it would let those who are big on the pointless negativity bury themselves. But it seems the site is more interested in keeping it positive, to the detriment of an interesting dialogue. I know from experience that moderating comments is an inexact art (there’s nothing scientific about it). But it should be done in a way that errs on the side of openness. If you’re wrong, take your lumps. Even if you’re John Cusack.

As for the rest of ChuffPo, another day hasn’t found me more impressed. I know Rachel Maddow replacing Dan Abrams on MSNBC is a big deal to a small group of people – most of whom probably include HuffPo on their list of daily reads – but I’d hardly call it a lead national news story. And while I was born a south suburban kid who had a huge crush on Jami Gertz, even I can’t see the reason for publishing her mash note to…Glenview. (Seriously, Glenview?)

Part of me thinks I’m being too critical. Then again, if Lee Abrams likes what they’re doing maybe I’m right on this after all.

“I think they do a great job for day one. Personally, the story selection, the categories, the scannability [sic] are all great. Check their Crime page.”

Incidentally, the “Crime page” that Abrams refers to is nothing more than a link and pretty picture to SpotCrime.com, which has nothing on the ease of use of EveryBlock, which gives you the same information, and much more. (Don’t let SpotCrime fool you: It doesn’t have much data for the current day, unless you believe that no crimes occurred in the city…)

Finally, I’m still wondering about this whole “HuffPo not paying bloggers is wrong” meme. The only argument seems to be “Arianna Huffington has a lot of money and ought to spread it around.” In that case, shouldn’t the same people who are taking HuffPo to task for its use of free labor also direct their ire at other well-heeled members of the publishing and media industries who use free labor (a.k.a. interns) all the time? Seriously, convince me. Or do you not think doing your interview transcriptions and running across town to pick up product from a vendor is also something of value? Even though the only reason you have time to write is because your interns are doing all the shit jobs you don’t want to do?

More on ChuffPo

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I’ve mentioned before the difficulty I have in deciding what to blog about here and what to blog about at TOC. My TOC blog post on Huffington Post Chicago – or as I’ve been calling it ChuffPo – could have gone either way. But the gist of that post ended up directed not so much at ChuffPo, but at the whole of the arts and entertainment press and their blogger brethren. In our quest for page views or cover lines, we’re missing some things, or letting publicists dictate our coverage. So we – the experts – are missing the city that exists all around us, and running the risk of someone else acquiring the mantle of the most informed.

Which brings me back to a few lingering thoughts on ChuffPo…

Granted, it’s only a few days in, but I’m not really sure what the site has to offer. As I allude to in the TOC post, most of the content on the site consists of links to stories you’d see in many other places. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s nothing that distinguishes that content. Even Gapers Block‘s Merge section, which offers a quick to-the-point glance at big headlines of the day, still manages to do so with a certain style and voice.

Yes, it has some celebrity bloggers you might not find elsewhere. Unfortunately, none of them have had much to say (really, John Cusack, that’s all you got in you?). And the true Chicago voices in the mix have…well, if I want to read or hear what they have to say, I can go elsewhere, as most of them have columns, features or work in other places.

Speaking of HuffPo contributors, Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood Reporter raised an issue last week (2nd to last item) about the site’s lack of monetary compensation that’s been on my mind as of late, ever since a Gawker post on the same subject: If people are going to write for you – and you’re making money off them – you ought to be paying them. Rhodes has a point, to an extent, particularly about the lunacy of helping a competing business for free. But magazines – and newspapers – utilize unpaid talent (we call ’em interns) all the time. In fact, they depend on them. And those who excel in this grindhouse boot camp are often placed at the front of the line when there are jobs to be had at those same publications.

Disclosure time: I used to blog at Chicagoist, and while there was some monetary incentive for going above and beyond, I gave it away for free during most of my 2 1/4 year stint there (not to mention the work I did for our Ctrl-Alt-Rock events that were for the promotion of the site/brand). But all that free labor directly led to paid freelancing work, and is largely responsible for me having a job at TOC. So it’d be ridiculous of me to suggest that free labor in this environment is unethical (a Gawker blog commenting on fair labor practices would seem problematic as well, but nevermind). And since most of the critics in a TOC roundtable back in January said they’d still be doing what they do even if they had to do it for free, who am I to criticize?

It’s fine for these folks to look for more exposure (and some of the print scribes probably see it as I saw Chicagoist – as a door to more work down the line). But the whole thing has a very arm’s length feel to it right now, a sort of best-of compendium that has yet to present a real view of the city. And frankly I worry that its east coast pedigree will give it the bona fides that it hasn’t earned (especially since according to Ferdy, it can dish it out but has trouble taking it).

Yet.

Consider the following:

“With all its unfair built-in advantages, Huffington Post Chicago could actually help push one or even both of Chicago’s daily newspapers — both struggling mightily for different reasons — right to the brink of extinction. And if that happened, HPC would ultimately be shooting itself in the foot. If the Chicago Tribune disappeared, so would half of the actual news the Huffington Post now highlights.” – Will Bunch; Philly.com

To be fair, ChuffPo is blogging about stories from all over. And since sites like ChuffPo actually funnel traffic to newspaper sites, I’m not really sure how Bunch’s point follows. Besides, a site like ChuffPo ought to be filling in the blanks – particularly with content like this nightmarish account of one person’s stay at Swedish Covenant Hospital – not trying to do what a daily does. That’s now how it will become a source of real power.

Maybe Bunch just wanted to get quoted on Romenesko, and that’s why he said something so ludicrous. In fact, in the next paragraph he turns around and says that dailies and ChuffPo need each other. So there you go.

And that’s what I mean about the view from a distance. If Bunch knew anything about Chicago, he’d know the Tribune isn’t in any immediate danger of disappearing (even if some of its great talentis). The Sun-Times is doing a fine job of killing itself, with no help needed from ChuffPo or anyone else.