News consumers: Salon’s Alex Pareene wrote today of the combined media entity, “This will now be the single largest SEO-gaming operation ever created.” Both AOL and the Huffington Post share the emphasis on click-happy headlines, which continue to clog up Google searches and make the original stuff harder to find. They also both emphasize speed over quality, aggregation over originality, and opinion over reporting. So perhaps this isn’t such an unlikely union, after all. And perhaps this won’t really change what online news readers are getting from what they’ve already got; they’ll just get it faster, and there will be even more of it.
The News Frontier
02:55 PM - February 7, 2011
Parsing the AOL/HuffPo Merger
What everyone gets out of the deal, and what to look for next
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
What to do if you find a baby bird
Expert advice
Inside Google’s secret lab
We might deplore the practice, but posting pictures of our food online is a way to bring everyone to the table
How the ‘World’s 50 Best’ list changed the way elite restaurants do business
“Every time the restaurant switched up its format, it got plenty of accompanying media coverage that let judges know they needed to return to see what was going on”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
AOL will drive the Huffington Post into the ground--as it has done with nearly everyone thing it has touch. That's not such a bad thing with the Post.
#1 Posted by Chris Harper, CJR on Sun 20 Feb 2011 at 06:27 PM