Tag: Huffington Post

Share your thoughts on Obama’s presser

Friend of Media Nation Jon Keller has written a post at Beatthepress.org in which he endorses Dana Milbank’s account in the Washington Post of President Obama’s “prepackaged entertainment” at Tuesday’s White House news conference.

As you may already know, Obama called on Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, saying, “I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”

I don’t want to provide too much set-up before turning this over to you, but here is what Pitney wrote for HuffPo about what happened. Pitney says that though he was invited to prepare a question based what Iranians had been talking about online, no one at the White House knew what he was going to ask; and that though he was, indeed, escorted into the briefing room, he had been told ahead of time that there was no guarantee he’d be called on.

Now, I have two questions for you, which I want you to answer only after reading Keller, Milbank and Pitney.

1. If you relied solely on Milbank’s account, would it be your understanding that Obama knew what Pitney’s question would be?

2. Since, according to Pitney, Obama neither knew the question nor had promised to call on him, did either the president or his press operation do anything wrong, unethical or even disrespectful to the other reporters in the room?

Talking about the Globe at the Mirror Awards

Alas, my work in the Guardian came up short for the second year in a row in the Syracuse University Mirror Awards, as I lost out yesterday to Clive Thompson of Wired.com in the category of online media commentary.

There was plenty of buzz about the Boston Globe at the luncheon, held in the not-very-spacious confines of New York’s Harmonie Club. Several New York Times people I spoke with, including media columnist David Carr, were speculating about why the Newspaper Guild voted “no” and what might happen next.

We also heard from Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, whose receipt of a lifetime achievement award was controversial given her perceived role in harming the news business.

She got off the best line of the day, saying (this is a close paraphrase; I should have taken notes, but I couldn’t extend my elbows sufficiently), It’s not true that I single-handedly destroyed the newspaper business. I had help from Craigslist. Ho, ho.

HuffPo finesses the revenuers

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell has an interesting piece on potential tax problems for the Huffington Post with regard to the new $1.75 million investigative-reporting project it announced last week.

The conundrum is that HuffPo is a for-profit, while the Huffington Post Investigative Fund is a non-profit. If it looks like the non-profit entity exists mainly to serve the for-profit, there could be a problem. That’s one of the reasons why the people who are in charge of the investigative project, Nick Penniman and Jay Rosen, say their work will be available to everyone, not just HuffPo.

Rosen and proto-blogger Dave Winer talk about the project in their weekly podcast. (Excuse my self-promotional indulgence; I come up, but only for a minute or two.)

Simply in terms of image, this is a great move for the Huffington Post, whose aggressive aggregation of other content, in my view, brings it right to the edge of copyright violation. “Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post,” the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton recently said.

By giving back and producing original content that everyone can use, HuffPo may be able to quiet the critics. Just as long as it can keep the IRS happy at the same time.