and Social Media
In the world we’re
living in, the news and social media have nearly become one. They flow
seamlessly together as we are allowed to share news articles, photos and videos
quickly and effortlessly to our Facebook pages. We can tweet URL’s and share
any bit of information we read with our Twitter followers, who can then, pass
it on to their followers at high speeds. Not only that, but we can do any of
this from our mobile devices, including tablets and cell phones. But this,
however, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The goal of this
assessment is to examine how news mediums use social media to create a web of
information, how well they use it, and also, how these entities can improve
their use of these applications. For this assignment, I followed news entity, The Huffington Post, to discover how
they utilized various forms of social media including, Facebook, Twitter, blogs,
as well as lesser-known media and web and mobile applications.
What
is The Huffington Post?
The Huffington Post is
an American news website, content aggregator, and blog founded by political
activist Arianna Huffington, along with Kenneth Lerer, Andrew Breitbart, and
Jonah Peretti.
The site features the
content of columnists and various news sources and offers news, blogs and
original content. Though originally established as a political news site, The
Huffington Post covers a wide range of topics including, politics, business,
entertainment, environment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture,
comedy, healthy living, women's interest and local news. Possessing an active and diverse community, the
site has over one million comments made each month.
The Huffington Post,
owned by AOL as of February 2011, was launched on May 9, 2005, and is known as
a left-leaning political commentary outlet. However, Arianna Huffington has
stated that its goal is to go beyond the “traditional liberal and conservative divide
in American politics and news media.”
Commonly called
HuffPost or HuffPo, the site was the 6th-largest news site in the United States
as of April 2011 and attracted 40 million monthly visitors in January 2012. The
site has seen steady, significant growth since it was launch.
In July 2012, The
Huffington Post was ranked #1 on the 15 Most Popular Political Sites list by
eBizMBA Rank and was the first commercially run, United States digital media
enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Use of
Social Media
The
site has developed an active community in the last seven years, drawing
hundreds of thousands of comments per month, as well as millions of Facebook
fans and Twitter followers. CEO Eric Hippeau has described HuffPost as “one
part social network, one part news content site.” As of 2012, it had 13
employees in social and community engagement, plus 30 in comment moderation.
Facebook
and Twitter
In 2009, HuffPost Social News was launched in
partnership with Facebook. The partnership integrates the Facebook Connect API to
allow its readers to recommend and share news with friends. The project has
helped increase the site’s traffic significantly according to statistics from
the Nieman Journalism Lab. In 2010, the site launched HuffPost Badges, which rewarded users for participation within the
HuffPost community.
It has also launched
Twitter editions of several of its section pages including Huffington Post
Blog, Huffington Post LA, HuffPost Politics, El Huffington Post, HuffPost Women
and several more page-specific Twitter accounts. It is here that Twitter users
can follow and read articles specifically from the sections they are interested
in.
HuffPost users can also
sign into The Huffington Post’s website via Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Users are given a username and use their Facebook or Twitter login information to
access the site. This allows them to see what Facebook and Twitter friends are
reading on the site and also allows for friends to see articles and videos the
user accessed from their own newsfeed.
Blogs
In
an effort to add more user-generated content, The HuffPost unveiled a comment
system that allowed for the site’s top commenters to become featured bloggers
on the site. Launched in 2007, blogging and citizen journalism have become an
essential aspects of the HuffPost’s content.
Scott
Karp, the co-founder & CEO of Publish 2, a content sharing and advertising company
targeted specifically at small businesses, stated that rather than using only
well-established bloggers or allowing any user to blog for the site, The
HuffPost changed the rules with their new system.
Karp (2007) states:
“Instead, they took a
middle path, opening up an opportunity for ANYONE who actively comments on
Huffington Post to become a blogger — but with one caveat…they have to EARN it.
Or put another way — they are leveraging the power of the network, while still
creating boundaries to channel value.”
Other
Social Media and Apps
On
the Front Page, users can find all the different ways they can connect with The
Huffington Post’s website through sites I’ve mentioned, such as Facebook and
Twitter, as well as iPhone and Android mobile applications and RSS feeds,
allowing users to subscribe through various mediums. Simply by clicking the
icons, users are linked to pages where they can download the apps instantly to
their cell phone or tablet.
HuffPost was also one of the initial partners of
the publisher program of the social magazine app Zite designed for originally
for iPad, which allows its users to read magazines from their mobile devices
and adapts to their interests. It has also opened its own HuffPost Pollster API
to allow developers to use its poll data, and has a HuffPost Labs website for
its experimental products.
Conclusion—An
Effective Use?
From
my research, I devised that The Huffington Post, as a news entity, effectively
uses social media and from what I’ve seen, utilizes social media better than
most other news sites. Literally, The Internet Newspaper, the HuffPost was
created for the Internet and as the Internet has evolved with the addition and
development of social media, so has the site.
As
social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, news entities have
learned to utilize these tools to spread information, articles, stories,
videos, etc. across the web as efficiently as possible and have reaped the
rewards of this.
According to British
daily paper, the Guardian, and
Forbes.com, statistics show that the HuffPost did not become profitable until
2009. The site was profitable on $30 million in annual revenues when it was
purchased by AOL in 2011 and increased revenues to $40 million by the end of that
same year.
Everywhere you look on
HuffPost you see a user written blog, a “tweet” link allowing users to post
links to their followers, or a “share” button just waiting for users to post
the articles and videos they view to their Facebook pages. Being able to
subscribe to various sections of the site, as well as to RSS gives users an instant
connection to the news they want.
References
Aldred, J., Astell, A.,
(2008, March 8). The world’s 50 most powerful blogs. The Guardian. Retrieved
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs
Bercovici, J. (2012, May
24). The Case Against AOL, In Numbers. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/05/24/the-case-against-aol-in-numbers/
Bunz, M. (2012, January
4). Huffington Post and Politico set to make 2009 profit. The Guardian.
Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jan/04/huffington-post-politico-to-make-profit
Karp, S. (2007, August
16). The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters to Become Bloggers. Publishing
2.0. Retrieved from http://publishing2.com/2007/08/16/the-huffington-post-allows-top-commenters-to-become-bloggers/
The Huffington Post (2012). Facebook. Retrieved
from http://www.facebook.com/HuffingtonPost
The Huffington Post.
(2012). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
The Huffington Post. (2012).
Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/HuffingtonPost
The Huffington Post.
(n.d.). In Nieman Journalism Lab Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/huffington-post
Zite. (2012). Retrieved from http://zite.com/
