Picking on The Huffington Post
Not in a bad way. Last night Obama chose a Huffington Post reporter for a question (specifically Sam Stein). Just to give it some context, here’s a few publications who didn’t get to ask any questions: The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Time and Newsweek.
Made me think about this little bit of original reporting I just ran across from Simon Owens. Simon looked at the top 10 blogs from Technorati to calculated how much of their content was “data that wasn’t already freely available on the web.” His findings: On average 13% of the top 10′s content was original, with Techcrunch leading with 37%.
Hi, I'm 
It’s interesting: I don’t consider Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo or TechCrunch blogs. I think the term has outlived its usefulness as an umbrella for both people’s personal sites and lightweight publishing models. HuffPo and TC simply using blogging software and conventions. Sam Stein, Erick Schoenfeld, et al are pro journalists.
My guess is we’ll see more of these hybrids, since it’s not true that “the media is dying.” It’s changing, painfully. Bloated publishing companies will give way to more nimble ones. Software and some conventions will be borrowed from blogging. The result will be a information provider that will have some characteristics of a blog but many of a regular old news organization. There will be people all along the continuum, with the vast majority keeping blogs as a personal hobby and without any pretense as original news sources.
Stein, it should also be noted, is one of the few people Huffington pays (or at least I hope she does.)
Most of the site is written gratis, with the exchange being “we’ll make you more famous in other areas of your life.”