Arianna Huffington: New(s) Media Harbinger

As the ‘Rocky Mountain’ presses around the nation – i.e., every print newspaper and magazine – struggle to survive and fend off shutting down their presses, Arianna Huffington’s “HuffPo” bet looks more and more like the innovative news (and new) media play. With relatively resilient traffic – even after a political win in the last national elections (which could have been a political precipice in terms of traffic) – Huffington looks to be the news aggregation model to beat or partner with these days. While she is an elegant chief evangelist for HuffPo, her time as a “New Medici” to really crow is now.

For the past few years since HuffPo’s launch in May ’05, Arianna’s been the media diva speaking at any/everything, including Davos. I saw her at Google’s Zeitgeist conference two years ago with the ubiquitous keynoter Al Gore nearby.

Time recently covered her (again!) on her timing and success at her west coast office (read her Brentwood estate). Via Arianna Huffington: The Web’s New Oracle in TIME:

Today Icarus is in [Huffington's] shade. In February the Huffington Post, the website she started in 2005 with Ken Lerer and viral-marketing guru Jonah Peretti, became the 15th most popular news site, just below the Washington Post’s and above the BBC’s.

With rocky press futures currently and ahead – even in staff the scalable efficiencies are staggering: HuffPo has 55 staff compared to a thousand reporters, per Time, for the NYTimes – for HuffPo to continue its growth potential, it needs to find ways to partner and help the falling print vehicles.

Why that’s important? As Google, Carlos Slim of Telmex and others have begun to invest if not advise the Times, one also could make the case that HuffPo or similar could come in and create a HuffPo channel for ailing print media brands.

• Provide shared branding; JV (joint venture) the willing papers into a rev/company share with HuffPo.
• Blog network the print media traffic into masked HuffPo (sub)domains, while populating the high profile print stories on HuffPo’s parent site.
• Share story+author circulation liberally; give offline reporters a taste of the quicker, lower-paid blog life (unfortunately, it’s going to happen, so help with the transition on a paid – not Arianna’s celebrity-laden, unpaid guest roster (e.g., the left column of her home page).
• Share/Aggregate (shaggregate?) location-based articles via collaborative filtering – i.e., papers borrow HuffPo’s feeds to give their city/region a deeper level of news
• Tie into local television news groups as well to create a three-way production/aggregation/distribution service. In effect, HuffPo becomes the digital news arm, allowing the traditional print engines to stay relevant and enter television (while providing local tv stations with more stories, and analog (i.e., text+image) to aid their video offerings.

Now, this hypothetical extension of HuffPo’s abilities may seem grandiose, premature or delusional even. However, that we’ve even gotten to this place where innovation from a small brand with a vanity company name (and url) could threaten long-standing media brands is happening.

Many print co’s are trying to salvage their business plans, but without pivotal change – which many seem immune to given Craigslist has been ‘eating free classified lunches’ for a few years  now – the print end gets nearer and nearer.

When a Presidential election news cover does the best business of the year for these print corporations, it’s time to drastically reconsider the ‘paper’ stock options.

With HuffPo, the business is still earnest and young in media years. It’s time to start making more noise about the efficiencies of partnership, and seeing who shows survival interest.

Per Time, Huffington has rewritten her life, and now can crow even louder; but she also has the opportunity to rescue print media through partnership:

On the Internet, after all, nothing is set in stone; everything can be rewritten. History can be changed with a simple refreshing of the page.