[p2p-research] is the huffington post pilfering?

[Michel Bauwens]

http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/09/19/aggregators-the-good-ones-vs-the-looters/


*Editorially speaking, the HuffPo relies on a high profile
commentators,*members of Arianna Huffington social and political
circle, as well as on an
armada of unpaid bloggers (6000) edited by a commando of human cutters &
pasters and condensers.

The recipe is simple and extremely efficient: you take a 2600 words Vanity
Fair interview of the financial reporter Michael Lewis on the rotten Greek
public finances<http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/09/michael-lewis-talks-about-the-banks-that-brought-down-greece.html>,
you squeeze it down to 360 words (that’s down to 14% of the original
length), and you have a self-supporting article that perfectly sums up
Lewis’ point. This fits the internet era’s snippet culture: unless you
nurture a secret passion for Hellenic bonds, you have no need to click and
link from the HuffPo back to the original Vanity Fair story.

Still on business topics, the HuffPo is fond of economic professor Nouriel
Roubini, the famous doomsayer. Then, when he wrote a 1045 words piece in the
Washington Post
(here<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091605846.html>),
the HuffPo’s mincing machine squeezed it down to a 410 words
piece<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/17/payroll-tax-cut_n_720803.html>(a
mere 39% reduction). Since the piece dealt with a strong general
interest
theme, the Payroll Tax Cut, it triggered serious activity among HuffPo
readers: 510 comments and 72 Facebook “Like”; this is three times the number
of recommendations on the original Post article. I could go on an on with
more examples of HuffPo content and traffic hijacking.

*Here are the Huffington Post’s “principles”:
*– Take an original story available on the internet, preferably outside a
paywall.
– Match the subject of the story against a traffic analysis of what readers
like on your superblog.
– Process the story according a compression ratio of 15% to 30% (sometimes
more); stay as much as possible within an elastic interpretation of “fair
use”.
– The result of your editorial meat-processing *must absolutely* be a
self-sufficient entity.
– Always quote and link generously; your fairness and integrity must be
unquestionable; linking is no big deal since no one will actually click and
go to the original source (your treatment should be designed to prevent
going back to the originl content).
– You get it: the reader has to *stay* in the environment of the Huffington
Post, in which he will comment, babble profusely, (I spotted a 12,000
comments on a copyright free
video<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/17/stewart-colbert-rally-to-restore-sanity_n_720588.html>);
he will Facebook-share the “piece”, creating further reverberation the
HuffPo machine will sell to is advertisers. *Comprende*?

*The original content provider gets screwed? *How come a story that cost the
original publisher $10,000 or $30,000 to report, edit and produce gets
transformed into a mere one-gulp self-sufficient capsule? That’s the
internet, baby. If the publisher doesn’t want his stuff to be e-looted, he
should put it behind a paywall, or into a smartphone application.

-- 
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Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
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