Aggregation Aggravation: Germans Wary of New Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington

SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: Arianna Huffington hopes to replicate the success of her other international blog and aggregation sites in Germany -- but she may face more resistance here than in other countries.

The latest international edition of The Huffington Post, the controversial site run by Arianna Huffington, went live this Thursday in Germany.

Launched in cooperation with Tomorrow Focus AG, a part of the Hubert Burda Media conglomerate, Huffington Post Deutschland aims to bring her mixture of aggregation, reporting and celebrity punditry to German readers -- with the goal of becoming one of Germany's five biggest news sites by 2018.

The German media establishment, however, remains skeptical that Huffington's business model and media strategy, which has allowed it to surpass the New York Times' online readership in the United States, will be successful here.

In a translated blog post on the German site, Huffington welcomed readers, claiming "The Huffington Post represents the launch of a phase of change and disruption of the German media landscape." She pointed to the relatively low number of bloggers in Germany, arguing "this represents a huge growth potential for the HuffPost." She also wrote that she regrets never having learned German. In his debut post, Editor-in-Chief Sebastian Matthes, a former editor at Wirtschaftswoche, a weekly German business magazine, wrote, "in the next years, we aim to be indispensable, because we cover all of the big subjects in our own way." » | tmr | Thursday, October 10, 2013

THE HUFFINGTON POST: Liebe Grüße From Munich: HuffPost Goes to Germany » | Arianna Huffington | Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Huffington Post Deutschland »

Arianna Huffington: Beyond Left and Right
The co-founder of The Huffington Post on why the old concept of the political left and right marginalises issues.

Arianna Huffington Scorns 'Painful' Blogger Lawsuit
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Arianna Huffington, the co-founder and editor of The Huffington Post, has hit back at the group of bloggers filing a major lawsuit against her, saying the accusation that she treated them like “slaves” is “painfully unoriginal”.

EXTRACT: “It seems that AOL's purchase of HuffPost suddenly opened his eyes to the fact that we are a business. I guess he'd missed the ads that appeared on the same page as his blog posts the 216 times he decided, of his own free will, to post something on our site.”

She went on to compare free blogging to appearing for free on a TV show and said that blogging had changed media landscape forever.

“People blog on HuffPost for free for the same reason they go on cable TV shows every night for free: either because they are passionate about their ideas or because they have something to promote and want exposure to large and multiple audiences,” she argued.

“Our bloggers are repeatedly invited on TV to discuss their posts and have received everything from paid speech opportunities and book deals to a TV show…

“Bottom line: the vast majority of our bloggers are thrilled to contribute -- and we're thrilled to have them. Indeed, we are inundated with requests from people who want to use our platform. People are looking to join the party, not go home early. Read the whole article here, and comment » | Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor | Thursday, April 14, 2011

Related »

Bloggers Sue Arianna Huffington After 'Being Treated Like Slaves’
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Arianna Huffington faces a large lawsuit from unpaid contributors who claim The Huffington Post, recently acquired by AOL for $315 million, treated them like ‘modern day slaves’.

A group of angry bloggers, being led by freelance journalist and trade unionist Jonathan Tasini, filed the class action in New York federal court, after Huffington sold her internet newspaper in February for $315m without paying contributors a penny.

Tasini, who wrote more than 250 posts for The Huffington Post on an unpaid basis leading up to the site’s sale, said: “Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffingtons’s plantation”. He said he was suing because “people who create content…have to be compensated” for their work.

The complainant and his lawyers believe that bloggers’ articles helped contribute to approximately a third of the sale value of the site, with about 9,000 people writing for the [sic] Huffington Post for free. » | Sam Shead | Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Arianna Huffington's AOL Deal Sparks Accusations of a Political Sell-out
THE OBSERVER: The Huffington Post website made her the heroine of America's left, but critics say she failed to pay bloggers and used items generated by other news organisations

Arianna Huffington has long reigned as the queen of America's chattering classes, using her Huffington Post website as a platform to transform herself into a darling of the United States' left-leaning media elite.

But no longer. Since she announced that the HuffPo was being sold to web giant AOL for $315m, Huffington has been accused of being a political sellout and someone who made a personal fortune from the labour of thousands of bloggers who write for no pay.

America's Newspaper Guild, the journalists' union, has started a campaign to target the Huffington Post as having a business model that has done great damage by not paying contributors. It has demanded that Huffington donate some of her AOL deal profits to investing in paid journalism. "After building a media empire based on unpaid writers and republishing the works of others... we are calling on Arianna Huffington to invest in quality journalism by sharing a portion of this fortune," said the guild's president, Bernie Lunzer.

That appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears. HuffPo spokesman Mario Ruiz denied the website was a problem for the industry, saying: "It's both wrong and offensive to insist that the HuffPo is exploiting journalists."

But since the AOL deal was announced this month, there has been an avalanche of criticism of the website and its smooth-talking founder. "To grasp its business model... you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates," blasted Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten. >>> Paul Harris, New York | Sunday, February 27, 2011

FACEBOOK: "Hey Arianna, Can You Spare a Dime?" >>>

FACEBOOK: Info – Arianna – AOL deal >>>

GUILD FREELANCERS: Petition: Arianna got millions; we got bylines >>>

Arianna Huffington: 'I Believe in Little Legions'

THE GUARDIAN: The $315m sale of the Huffington Post to AOL is a great deal for its founder – but what about the unpaid bloggers who made it a success?

Although Arianna Huffington has achieved worldwide fame as an internet pioneer, her comfort with self-publicity turning her into the face of what may be the future of news websites, she also nurses a lifelong love for therapies that she calls "natural" and others call something else. Fire walking, homeopathy, infrared saunas – Huffington has tried them all over the years, never struggling to balance what some might see as two contrary schools of thought in her head: the hard cutting edge of new media and the fluffy airy-fairiness of New Age.

In her private office – which is almost as glossy as she is, filled with plush armchairs and an intricately carved desk – books by Andrew Weil (an advocate for vitamin supplements who has written numerous books on self healing through breathing, "energy food" and "vibrational sound") sit happily alongside David Remnick's tub thumper tome, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. On her desk, bottles of tinctures are placed in front of a photo of her with Queen Rania of Jordan and a handwritten note inviting her to brunch, signed Russell Simmons (whose book Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All is also on Huffington's bookcase, as though she needs any advice on that score.) Even though Christmas was two months ago, particular holiday cards linger on her window sill, including one from Joe Biden and another from a couple whose photo on the front is jarringly familiar: "Seasons greetings," it reads inside. "Tony, Cherie and family."

In short, it is all a testament to how much Huffington's eponymous website – on which features espousing holistic therapies run alongside political pieces about, say, John McCain or Egypt and columns by her celebrity friends, such as Nora Ephron – reflects the personality of its founder. But it's a personality that has puzzled some by its fluidity, "a mind as flexible as her body is unwieldy", as a 2008 profile of Huffington in the New Yorker magazine put it. Huffington has been, at various times, a self-help writer, a political pundit, an antagonist of feminists, a champion of women's causes, a follower of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, the champion of new media, a supporter of Newt Gingrich, a fan of President Obama, a Republican and a Democrat. >>> Hadley Freeman | Tuesday, February 15, 2011

AOL to Buy Huffington Post for $315m
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: AOL, the online company, is buying [The] Huffington Post, the internet newspaper, in a $315m (£196m) deal that represents a big bet on the future of online news.

The acquisition, which will put [The] Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington in charge of all AOL content, brings AOL an additional 25m unique visitors a month.

That could help AOL begin to turn around its display advertising business, which has struggled to grow as the company tries to turn itself into a content provider and moves farther away from its roots providing dial-up Internet.

The deal "will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers," Tim Armstrong, the AOL chief executive, said in a statement announcing the deal on Monday.

Founded in 2005, [The] Huffington Post is owned by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and a group of other investors. AOL will pay $300m of the purchase price in cash.

Arianna Huffington will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all [The] Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, MapQuest, Patch and more. >>> AP | Monday, February 07, 2011

AOL-HuffPo Leaders Talk About Acquisition
AOL's Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington talk about the $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post by the Internet giant

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Is The Huffington Post really worth $315 million? >>> Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor | Monday, February 07, 2011

Huffington Comments on Failures of Administration
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Arianna Huffington tells WSJ's Jerry Seib and Alan Murray that the Obama Administration's big flaw was to underestimate the extent of the economic devastation on Main Street. The answer to a solution, she says, is to stop seeing everything as a left/right division.

Johann Hari: The Refugee Who Rocked Islam: an Exclusive Interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
THE HUFFINGTON POST: Ayaan Hirsi Ali was stabbed into the world's consciousness four years ago. One wet afternoon in November 2004, her friend Theo Van Gogh - descendant of Vincent - left his house and was about to start cycling down the streets of Amsterdam. But a young Dutch-born Muslim called Mohammed Bouyeri was waiting for him - with a handgun and two sharpened butcher knives. Wordlessly, he shot Van Gogh twice in the chest. Van Gogh howled, "Can't we talk about this?" Bouyeri ignored his pleas and fired four more times. Then he pulled out a butcher's knife and slit Van Gogh's throat with such strength his head was almost severed from his body. He used the other knife to stab a five-page letter into Van Gogh's haemorrhaging corpse. Ayaan explains, "The letter was addressed to me."

It said Van Gogh had been "executed" for making a film with her that exposed the widespread abuse of Muslim women. Now she would be "executed" too, for being an apostate. Even now, "Every time I close my eyes, I see the murder, and I hear Theo pleading for his life," she says. "'Can't we talk about this?' he asked his killer. It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent." At the trial, Bouyeri spat at Van Gogh's mother: "I don't feel your pain. I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because I think you're a non-believer."

This is the story of how a 25 year-old bogus asylum seeker from Africa came to Europe in search of freedom - only to be nearly murdered here by a Dutchman, on the streets of Amsterdam, for speaking out against religion. It opens in the blood-strewn streets of Somalia, and it closes in the shiny white marble of Washington D.C - yet it also ends where it began: with Ayaan's life in imminent, immediate danger. This is the story of the refugee who rocked Islam.

Her light, slight figure walks into the room so quietly that I would not have noticed her. But then the bodyguards follow: big and tall, with their eyes darting into every corner in search of the long-awaited assassin, and you realise - yes, she is here. The internet is littered with pledges to torture and slay Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet just a few weeks before we meet in London, the Dutch government has stripped away her security detail. She is paying for her own bodyguards now - and she could soon run out of cash. So how did this soft-voiced woman come to be so hated - and to be abandoned by the country that gave her sanctuary? >>> By Johann Hari | November 30, 2008

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