MSM Vets help Online Media take Hold

WASHINGTON (By Keach Hagey, Politico) October 9, 2010 ― The string of prominent departures of senior journalists from the ranks of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek to young start-ups like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast form an industry inflection point that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

These Web publications were set up to challenge the establishment. They’re quickly becoming it.

The latest shift began last month when Howard Fineman, a correspondent at Newsweek for 30 years and frequent television pundit, left to become a senior editor at the Huffington Post. At the time, considering Newsweek’s financial struggles, media watchers weren’t sure if the move said more about the rising fortunes of the 5-year-old Huffington Post or the problems at the 77-year-old newsweekly.

But then Peter Goodman left The New York Times to become the site’s business editor, and it became clear that Huffington was on a mission.

“Ever since we launched the Huffington Post, I’ve been saying that we’ve been moving into a hybrid future,” Arianna Huffington told POLITICO. “It’s not going to be either/or. It’s going to be new media blending with old media, and old media with new media, and that’s what’s happening.”

She was speaking at her book party this week, which happened to take place a few hours after the biggest old-to-new media bombshell of them all: Howard Kurtz’s defection to the Daily Beast after 29 years at the Washington Post.

Despite the well-publicized rivalry between Huffington and Beast editor Tina Brown, Kurtz was warmly greeted at the party as the man of the hour and Huffington took his hiring as a good sign for Web journalism in general.

“It’s just that sites like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast are maturing, and are getting to the next level in terms of incorporating traditional journalists,” she said.

In August, the Huffington Post got over 24 million unique visitors, according to comScore, far more than The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times or The Wall Street Journal, though 6,000 less than The New York Times. It has grown from 110 to 195 staffers over the past year.

Of course, the former places of employment of these traditional journalists don’t always take so kindly to the change. Last month, Huffington got into a war of words with former Washington Post executive editor and current vice president-at-large Len Downie, who called sites like the Huffington Post “primarily parasites living off journalism produced by others.”

Huffington shot back, citing the original reporting by paid journalists on her site and its prodigious output of 300 blog posts a day. But clearly, she is moving even further from the aggregation-heavy model that initially defined the site.

“As the Huffington Post gets bigger, it’s going to become more traditional in some respects,” Fineman said. “The trick is to keep the energy and growth and sense of community, while at the same time, taking advantage of the fact that it’s growing so much that is has to, by definition, be more mainstream.”

While Goodman made it clear in an interview with Kurtz that he joined the Huffington Post because he wanted a “chance to write with a point of view” and was tired of “laundering” his own views through think tanks, Fineman said he joined because he was confident that there was no single point of view.

“I could have stayed,” at Newsweek, he said. “There’s no problem with staying. Just the more I thought about what was going on at the Huffington Post, the more interested I was. All the Websites — what’s going on with you guys, with POLITICO, with Huffington Post, with what David Bradley is trying to do at the National Journal — this is where the excitement and ferment is now, on native digital journalism, things that began on the Web. If I’m going to do something about that, I may as well go native.”

Kurtz echoed Fineman’s sentiments, both in terms of the web’s excitement and his confidence that he wasn’t going somewhere more partisan than where he was before.

“The Daily Beast has a really impressive list of conservative columnists as well as liberal columnists,” Kurtz said. “And that was a key factor in my thinking, because I’ve always been a down-the-middle guy, and would not want to work for a Website that was seen as leaning one way more than the other. To me, the quality of the reporting and writing and the lack of any agenda were what proved so attractive.”

A day after Kurtz announced his move, Richard Johnson announced he was leaving the editorship of the New York Post’s Page Six after 25 years to work on “digital ventures” for News Corp. in Hollywood.

Although having your parent company move you out to work on their iPad newspaper Manhattan Project is a bit different than making the kind of leap to a startup that Kurtz or Fineman did, the move still send shockwaves through the industry.

“Five years ago, I could not have imagined going to an organization that didn’t have a print product,” Kurtz said. “As a guy who delivered newspapers at the age of 13, it’s still an adjustment for me. But there’s so much energy and creativity online now — and the Daily Beast is an example of that — that I feel very comfortable in making the leap.”
For a younger generation of journalists, of course, such distinctions seem ridiculous, said Michael Shanahan, an assistant professor of journalism at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

“Online is no different in their cultural frame of reference from a print newspaper,” he said of his students. “If anything, they don’t even think about the print newspaper very much. It’s not that they’re rejecting it, although there is some element of ‘Ew, it’s a dirty old thing with ink on it and it’s an environmental hazard.’ It’s just that they’ve grown up with these technologies and ways of communicating.”

But it’s more than the technology that’s changing. It’s the cultural weight of the brands.
“Is working for The New York Times the top of the heap in ambition for the rest of their lives?” he said.“For a certain number of them it is. But for many of them, I don’t think it is anymore.”

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which both Fineman and Kurtz attended, said his students just want a good job coming out of school, regardless of the medium.

“There’s a whole new economy out there,” he said. “The sites that Howie and Howard are going to are notable for their high traffic, and from the outside, relatively robust financial status. There are a lot of relatively shaky Websites out there too.”

Columbia journalism school graduates went to work at the Daily Beast and Huffington Post “as soon as they were up and running,” he said. He pointed to the example of Sam Stein, the Huffington Post political reporter who joined the site right out of journalism school and, within four months, broke the “respectable part” of the John Edwards scandal. (Not the waiting-outside-hotels part, he quipped, but the combing-through-financial-documents part.)

“They always had our students’ attention from Day One,” he said.