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To mark the relaunch of the Editors Weblog, the World Editors Forum is running a special series entitled "Doing More with Less." The series highlights major trends that editors-in-chief are using to steer their newsrooms through the difficult economic climate. The fourth of the series takes a look at the hugely successful online-only news site, the Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post was a runaway success in 2008; with 8 million readers during the US election campaign, it is now the most 'linked-to' blog on the Web and is valued at up to $200million. It only employs around 50 staff, just a handful of which are editorial. To do so much with so little, is an impressive feat indeed. The Editors Weblog spoke to HuffPost's Founding Editor Roy Sekoff, and National Editor Nico Pitney, to examine the crucial elements that contribute to its success and look at how it plans to maintain that success post-elections.

HUFFING AND PUFFING TOWARDS SUCCESS

Content
To explain HuffPost's huge popularity, Sekoff pointed to the mix of different content you can get on the site. "It's a very vital and dynamic blend of breaking news, aggregated news and real-time commentary," meaning that you can find out the information you want and immediately see what people have been saying about it. It offers a bit of everything, both "esoteric and pedestrian," And a crucial factor is the mix of people who write on the site, from Hillary Clinton to Larry David to Arianna Huffington herself. Sekoff explained that it is "not just a certain kind of writer. You could get an actor, an architect and a politician all weighing in on the same issue."

Speed
The speed at which news can be reported in an online model is invaluable for HuffPost's success and for the news industry today. "The Internet has enabled us to get what we want, when and how we want it," Sekoff declared, "and it turns out they want it fast." He described the moment when the benefits of online really hit home in HuffPost's early days. It was the day of the July 2005 London bombings and HuffPost had been covering the story from the early hours of the morning, with bloggers sending in information and pictures from London. Then the morning New York Times appeared, with London on the front page but topped with the wrong headline: about the city hosting the 2012 Olympics. "It literally was yesterday's news," Sekoff stressed. Pitney was enthusiastic about how HuffPost can provide "instantaneous coverage about what's happening," and can immediately try to get comments from people involved in the story.

Interconnectedness
The HuffPost team have also made a considerable effort to make the whole site as appealing and user-friendly as possible, as while it was originally envisaged that readers would purposefully come to the home page and then move around the site, now many people end up landing on other pages through links from searches or social media sites. Sekoff explained that they had been "working to make each landing page full of as much content as possible," with images, related stories, or recommendations for further reading, "to make much content intuitively available for people who are interested in certain topics." There is extensive "interconnectedness" between elements of the site, which both reduces the chances of readers missing things in the vast array of stories available, and makes the site more 'sticky,' increasing traffic.

Links
Sekoff was confident that the HuffPost was a financially sustainable endeavour. Its revenue largely comes from advertising, and this is based on its high traffic as a result of being the most linked-to blog on the Web. "It has become a link-based economy. You are not being paid in dollars any more for your piece, but rather you are being paid in traffic." So from a financial standpoint, the main focus is simply to get good content onto the site, which will encourage people to link to it, increase traffic and then generate more advertising revenue. The HuffPost does syndicate some of its content but Sekoff stressed that this was not an element of the site's business model.

"It has become a link-based economy. You are not being paid in dollars any more for your piece, but rather you are being paid in traffic."

Free contributions
HuffPost has invited over 2000 people to be part of its group blog. These successful, influential leaders in their fields are not paid but many still regularly offer their insight and comments to the virtual pages of HuffPost. So in terms of getting good readable content onto the site, this is a very cost effective way to do it. Sekoff explained why he thinks so many people are willing to write for the site: "we offer our bloggers a tremendous platform." The most obvious reason is simply the volume of readership HuffPost can offer: "on the HuffPost, stuff gets read." Very few people receive more than a few thousand readers on their individual blogs, while on HuffPost they can get millions. The "engaged readership" is a related factor, Sekoff believes. "People are always struck by how immediate the response is and how reasoned and interesting the comment section can be."

Another simple but important reason people like to blog for the HuffPost is the lack of commitment and deadlines. "People are free to write what they want when they want," Sekoff clarified, "so it's great for people who have something to say but don't have time to maintain their own blog." As most of the people who blog for HuffPost do other things - and in fact it is these other things that they do that make them so interesting - they appreciate the freedom to be able to speak out when they want to but have no obligation. "Nobody is carrying the weight themselves," he added, one of the advantages of having so many contributors.

Citizen reporters
HuffPost has also been embracing the free resource of citizen journalism and is confident of its potential. During the campaign the Off the Bus initiative, in conjunction with pro-am journalism venture New Assignment, used readers as reporters and was very successful. It was actually used to break stories, such as the 'Bitter Gate' scandal, and Sekoff described how readers continue to be excited about contributing to the site. In a project called 'Blogging the Meltdown,' people recount how the economic breakdown is affecting their communities, "putting flesh and blood on the statistics." He believes that tapping into the "storehouse of information and knowledge" provided by readers could be the future of much journalism.


PERFECTING POST-ELECTION PLANS

After its tremendous success during the election campaign, HuffPost is making plans for the future. Sekoff said that main areas of focus now are the presidential transition and the world economic downturn, and Pitney explained that much of the original reporting the Washington team are doing now is centred around the bailout plan. However, the site has already diversified from its original political focus and plans to continue doing so. A $25 million funding injection from Oak Investment Partners was announced in December last year and HuffPost has been looking at how to spend it.

One major area of expansion is localizing - HuffPost Chicago began in August 2008 and is described by site founder Arianna Huffington, as "part local news source, part resource guide, part virtual soap box." It includes a roundup of local services. San Francisco is coming next. A world section, in partnership with new international news service GlobalPost was recently launched. HuffPost has plans to create an investigative journalism fund, which will fund both daily breaking scoops and longer pieces, according to Sekoff, in an effort to make sure that this vital aspect of reporting is not lost due to a financial downturn. HuffPost will hire editors, but most of the writing will be done by freelancers, Pitney explained. He added that they will try to take advantage of the skills of some of the "great journalists" who are having trouble finding work due to the current financial situation in the newspaper world.
 
Although aggregation still very much forms the basis of the news reported on the site, HuffPost's original reporting team is expanding, according to Pitney, who added that a full time congressional reporter had just been hired. There are no photographers or videographers, but all reporters have been issued with a Kite phone, allowing them to take short videos at events which "almost instantly upload to an 'embed-able' video player online."

TRUMPING TRADITIONAL MEDIA?

Arianna Huffington insisted in an interview with Iwantmedia that HuffPost is not contributing to the demise of US daily newspapers in any way. Sekoff agreed, and Pitney stressed that newspaper journalists "are vital to what we do, and hopefully we are helping their work in the sense that we send them lots of readers, and we try to highlight their best work." Sekoff mentioned that he foresees a "hybrid future" for media operations, in which people will still get their information in a variety of ways.

"Newspaper journalists are vital to what we do, and hopefully we are helping their work in the sense that we send them lots of readers, and we try to highlight their best work." 

HuffPost is just one way in that variety. It has come up with a ground-breaking formula that involves minimum expenditure but provides maximum coverage: up to date, comprehensive aggregation combined with insight from famous names and readers, all of which is obtained for free. And although reader numbers have fallen from their peak during the US election campaign, what HuffPost offers is still original and effective enough to make its continued success very likely. Its expansion into local sites could be particularly popular considering the well-documented troubles of US metropolitan newspapers, and as investigative journalism is cut at newspapers, this could be area in which HuffPost excels. One potential threat comes from the fact that more and more newspaper websites are offering aggregation services themselves, But being first off the mark, HuffPost has a significant headstart.

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Emily Bell, Editor-in-Chief of guardian.co.uk in the UK.

View all the interviews in this series here. (including The New York Times, Financial Times, Fairfax Media...)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We're not doing that already. We changed our names last year from Guardian Newspapers Limited to Guardian News and Media, so we're moving away from defining ourselves as a newspaper company.
But we are still news. We are news-oriented, we are a news media company.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

I 100% disagree with that statement. 2014 is so close, of course there will still be print newspapers; it is ridiculous to suggest that. Will there be fewer print newspapers in 2014 in certain parts of Western Europe, the US, etc? Yes, most definitely.

But clearly the futurists in Davos haven't looked at newspaper markets in emerging economies like India, etc. where print products are proliferating. They are increasing faster, in basic circulation and number of titles, than they are declining in markets with more mature print readerships. It's a sweeping and very narrow generalization, which is wrong.

We will definitely have a printed product in 2014. If you said 2024 or 2034, who knows, I would say that's far too far away to guess, and it's possible not. Don't forget Arthur Sulzberger said: "I can conceive of a time when we will no longer produce the print paper." Whether he retracted it or not, it's clearly crossed his mind.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief here, said he could foresee a time when we will be mainly a digital company and that we don't have a printed product. He actually said that the last printed presses that we bought would be the last ones that would ever be bought.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

It's a complete break. Not so much what happened with the advent of the Internet, but much more what's happened with various programming protocols since, what you would know as Web 2.0, which is the ability to allow the uploading of information by the local generation.

Flickr, blogs, etc. have completely changed the game, because it means all matter of information is exposed and is available to be manipulated, uploaded, reported on, etc. by a whole set of people who are no longer in control of a distribution bottleneck. Actually, what we were doing ten years ago was exploiting a Web publishing bottleneck, which was that we had the money to have the server space, the rack space, the designers - anybody can do that now.

That's completely different, it's not just another slight development of an existing cycle.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

Yes, the participation of users in news is inevitable. It is growing and is welcomed. It is a massive opportunity for professional journalists to enhance what they do. The closer you are, the more authentic you are, and the more knowledgeable you can be, then the more purchase you have with the community that will come to you, tell you things and point to your work in certain areas.
I think if you don't have that, in the future as a journalist, you probably don't have much of a future.

'Threat' is a good thing. It's not so much a threat. Now you've got the news event itself, and an immediate set of breaking news competitors like wire services, the BBC, or SkyNews in the UK.
There's another band of capability roundup, people who are actually experts in the kind of events that are happening and who bring knowledge and insight and can communicate near the professionals - the professionals' job is (still) to communicate the stories and make them relevant and understandable. I don't think that's going away.

But what's happening is that there are now other people who can answer who might not be professional journalists - they might be professionals working in the world that you're writing about. It's Dan Gillmor's phrase, "There's always someone better placed in the story than yourself."
If I'm a media journalist writing about what's going on at the BBC... somebody who's inside the BBC, who's not part of their press operations, could be writing with more authenticity, because I can only ever have the view of the outsider.

However, the person who's inside the BBC might not really have the requisites and right perspective to be able to draw the conclusions that perhaps an outsider might have. So I think there's some kind of a blend of insights and knowledge which skillful and professional journalists ought to be able to meld together.

The threat is journalists not being good enough at that. I think it's entirely healthy that there are specialist bloggers who are pushing journalists to be better at what they do.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I think it's going through a difficult transitory period. The funding now available for people to concentrate for long periods of time on single subject stories, which may or may not come to fruition, has been greatly undermined by the restructuring of professional media.

When I see institutes in the US that are funded specially for investigative journalism, those things are slightly depressing. The idea that news media can't sustain expensive investigative journalism is disappointing.

But it's not all over, there's a vacuum at the moment around serious disclosure. There are not as many (investigative) stories gaining traction, but I think in the future the tools are all there. One of the things that electronic media does is make it harder to hold onto an exclusive, because bits and pieces of the story tend to emerge from all sorts of different sources (ie: the Enron story initially broken by a Time journalist).

Once bits of the story were out there, it gathers momentum much quicker than it used to. So the value of the investigative story, as in keeping it as a brand-defining element, becomes harder and therefore a lot of businesses tend to say, "It's hard for us to keep control of the story, it's even more expensive to dig out, therefore why don't we step down our investment in it."

But there are organizations like ourselves and others such as The New York Times that are absolutely committed to making sure that doesn't happen.

View the other interviews in the Future of Journalism series here.

Source: Emily Bell, editor-in-chief, guardian.co.uk

From time to time here at the Editors Weblog, we like to give you an idea of how journalism on the medium most affecting newspapers is shaping up and how it is going to look down the road. Here's the latest in what's going on in Internet journalism:

Despite their short existence, podcasts are one of the fastest growing new media of Web 2.0. Having only emerged in mid-2004, by the end of 2005 'podcast' was the New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year. Newspapers looking to innovate have rapidly adopted podcasts as part of their everyday news production, some providing morning news summaries to which readers who may not have the time to read during their commute can listen. The Editors Weblog spoke with three editors in charge of their respective paper's daily podcasting to find out the steps they're taking in integrating podcasting into their newsrooms.

2005 may be behind us, but the effects citizen journalism on the newspaper industry will continue to be felt well into the New Year and most likely, well into the future of journalism. Below are summaries of and links to three articles worth reading as newspapers adapt to the rapidly evolving citizen media landscape.

In a great read, media commentator Roy Greenslade gives a roundup of how the entire media industry is feeling saying, "We are in the middle of a media revolution.  Nobody knows where it will lead.  Media moguls are as uncertain about the future as junior journalists." But unlike other pundits, he thinks print will survive.