By Kevin McCauley
Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, ripped news aggregators like the Huffington Post as “parasites living off journalism produced by others,” during a Sept. 22 speech in London called “The New News.”
Aggregators “fill their websites with news, opinion, features, photographs and video they continuously collect—some would say steal” from other news sites and are staffed by mostly unpaid bloggers “who settle for exposure in lieu of money,” said Downie.
They build a audience via publishing strong political opinion pieces and titillating gossip and sex. “Revealing photos of and stories about entertainment celebrities account for much of the highly touted web traffic to the Huffington Post site,” said Downie.
The newsman isn’t clear whether “many or any of the aggregators will become profitable” or whether any of them will “become sources of original credible journalism.”
Downie also blasted “content farms” in which freelancers are paid a little money to produce articles for pick up by search engines. “These shallow articles are not really news reporting at all, he said.
Huffington Responds
Arianna Huffingon responded to Downe via a post on the Guardian’s America blog. She labeled Downie’s blast an example of the old media strategy of pointing fingers and calling names. “It’s a tactic familiar to school year inhabitants everywhere: when all else fails, reach for the nearest insult and throw it around indiscriminately.”
Huffington believes it’s ”time to stop pretending that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”
According to Huffington: “People like Downie continue to confuse aggregation with wholesale misappropriation, which violates copyright law.”
She also HuffPo carries plenty of original content including reporting and more than 300 blogposts a day.
Challenge for ‘Accountability Journalism’
Downie told the audience the future of “accountability journalism” is at stake. That form of journalism is produced by “stable news organizations that can facilitate professional reporting by experienced journalists, support them with money, logistics and legal backing, and present their work to a large public.”
He said “credible, verifiable journalism about what is important in life is needed more than ever amidst the babble of the blogosphere and social networks, the polarizing opinion and propaganda, the tabloid invasions of privacy and the cynical audience appeal of news presented as entertainment and entertainment presented as news.”
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