On Sunday, May 9th, The Huffington Post celebrated five years in business. Below, five CJR reporters reflect on various aspects of The Huffington Post’s legacy.
Liz Cox Barrett: Top 5 UNENTHUSIASTIC HuffPo Reviews of 2005 (NO PHOTOS) What is a birthday without being reminded of what you were like when you were first born, according to some of your peevish relatives (the ones who always knew you’d amount to nothing)? And so, below, some (very) early media reactions to the birth of The Huffington Post.
1. Nikki Finke, LA Weekly, May 12, 2005, “Celebs to the Slaughter: Why Arianna’s Blog Blows.” Sample: “Judging from Monday’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself…” Read more…
Ryan Chittum: The HuffPost’s Business Reporting Shows the Site Maturing Let’s get it out of the way up top that I think The Huffington Post is a mess—a schizophrenic, mostly unreadable hunk of tabloid journalism leavened with serious stuff. I mean, where else can you read a droning missive on the BP oil spill by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, helpfully identified as “Spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide,” on the same screen as “Lawrence Taylor RAPE Arrest: NFL Legend ARRESTED For Attacking Teenager” and “Elisabeth Hasselbeck SLAMS Erin Andrews’ Clothing, Excuses Stalker”?
Eyeballs JARRED. Reader GOOGLY-EYED After Reading HuffPo… Read more…
Alexandra Fenwick: Huffington Post and the Art of the Headline Everyone’s heard the Huffington Post described as the Drudge Report of the left, but someone once told me that they thought of the HuffPo as the New York Post for liberals, which I think makes a lot of sense. Both share a refined taste for the salacious, lowbrow, and downright distasteful; both take an almost palpable pleasure in writing eyeball-grabbing headlines on such subjects, though the way they go about grabbing eyeballs is quite different… Read more…
Clint Hendler: Stop Blaming The Huffington Post When I think about The Huffington Post, I’m troubled. But when I think harder, I reconsider what, exactly, makes me queasy. I don’t love the prime element behind Huffington Post’s business model: the army of unpaid writers whose work generates traffic to subsidize a small group of editors and reporters. But no one forces anyone to write for free, and The Huffington Post can plausibly claim that the writers get some intangibles—exposure and a small amount of cachet among them… Read more…
Greg Marx: Why My Brother Likes The Huffington Post I confess: The Huffington Post brings out the Andy Rooney in me. The site obviously supports some good journalism, it’s just as obviously used skillful aggregation to build a tremendous audience, and as a professional media observer you’d be derelict by not paying attention to it. But I’ve never really understood why so many people would choose it as their first place for news, rather than as a supplement. All those bright colors, and the photos everywhere! And never knowing where a link will go before I click on it! And why is it always shouting at me? If I stay on the site too long, I get a headache… Read more…
CJR Staff is a contributor to CJR.