Froomkin Hired by HuffPo
So the WaPo wanted to silence Dan Froomkin. And instead, their stupid decision has led to Dan Froomkin getting hired by an outlet with greater online circulation than them.
From Glenn Greenwald:
In yet another sign of how online media outlets are strengthening as their older establishment predecessors are struggling to survive, The Huffington Post has hired Dan Froomkin to be its Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger. Froomkin will oversee a staff of four reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post’s Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page. I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning.
[snip]
Huffington says that it is Froomkin’s views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal. The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides." Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both side without a voice — without any passion." The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price." Froomkin — who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-right" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession — echoes that view: "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the ‘splitting the difference’ culture that has infested traditional media."
I guess Arianna has none of the fears of criticism that the WaPo has–and knows how to bring in the page views.
Congrats to both the HuffPo and to Froomkin.
so can we all agree that outside of Eugene Robinson, there is no reason to link to kathy weymouth’s “Whores And Prestitutes Organization” (wapo) ???
seems reasonable to me
not to say that I’m all that familiar with “reasonable” or anything …
What a great new meme!!! The only suggestion I have is to make the first ’s’ a double to make sure people get it:
I was going to add it to the Urban Dictionary but it’s already there. I guess I’ve been living under a rock.
How ’bout we go with Palavering Pundits & Pressitutes?
Nothing like a big umbrella. *g*
Quel surprise that Arianna should snag Froomkin! I knew he’d not be out of circulation for long. *GGG*
I told ya we shoulda offered him a FRESH bag of cheetoes …
seriously though, kathy weymouth is a total fucking fool if she didn’t realize that Froomkin was going to land on his feet somewhere
and generate a lot of free publicity at the expense of his former employers
Leave Kathy aloooooone …
WaPootsomebody had to fill the void left by DC Madam !Congrats to HuffPo, Froomkin and all the lucky journos working with him.
I still read EJ Dionne, but other than him and Gene, I agree.
Good on you – Arianna!!
I’d add Dana Priest to the list.
She does some good work, I agree.
Ezra and Greg Sargent make three and that’s about it.
Congratters, Dan and good on Arianna! Hurray!
WAPO, worse than the Washington Nats….
Great free agent pick-up for the Huff.
This will be fun to watch….
Right On!!
I suggest spotlighting this post to every member of the WaPo. Your nice little graphic sticks home the point that decisions have consequences.
Nice to know where we can get a regular Froomkin fix!
Bob from HI
Who’ll be taking Froomkin’s place at the WaPo?
That should make Mr. Robinson very afraid. Adding Palin as a regular commentator would make it plain even to the inattentive that the WaPoop is simply the best material for Beltway kitty litter.
No one can say that WaPo lacks determination.
I spotlighted this post to the following:
I provided this Comment: ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Bob from HI
Nicely done.
Froomkin will be a boon to Huffpo. There’s so much opinion floating around there, and wildly different degrees of credibility and foundation v. fame, that it will be a nice, recurring “anchor” in the stream to have him there.
@13 I would too, but hasn’t she been fairly quiet lately? Amazing how all the whistleblowers dry up when the Change Agent comes in loaded for bear … to prosecute the whistleblowers who got him elected.
I will be interested to see what kind of form Dan’s column will take.
Oh, you’re still digging that chart I pulled up, huh?
The other chart I’m digging is WaPo’s stock performance.
-Go to finance.google.com
-look up WPO
-select 5 year chart
-add NYT and GCI (next two biggest papers)
-add Dow index
WaPo’s parent is underperforming its closest competitors and the entire market, in spite of the substantial financial buffer its education holding Kaplan provides.
Frankly, WaPo should be sold off in the best interests of WPO shareholders. Might be worthwhile to buy a few shares and demand this come up for a vote at the next shareholders’ meeting…
[edit: actually, shareholders should have suggested this to the board after S&P cut WPO’s ratings due to WaPo’s drag on the stock.]
Yup. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.
Or, if you’re Dana Milbank, 750.
Or, if you’re Dana Milbank, 750.
A thing of beauty, that.
@34 – thank you for the link.
750 on a very good day, and perhaps with smoking jacket…
Jane’s prediction was spot on.
Dan’s columns were and will be the nearest thing to real journalism available to us. [except FDL, of course] Great move, HuffPo!
Frequent guest on Countdown, Eugene Robinson typically provides a “measured” commentary. He is often reluctant to criticise as he uses laughter (not humor, per se) to blunt Olbermann’s blistering truth-telling critiques.
One wonders if Robinson will endeavor to become even more milquetoasty out of fear of becoming Froomkinized by the Corporation/Beltway-favoring (Fascist) Washington Post.
I think we will begin to see Robinson chuckle more and speak less.
i don’t like huffington post…
Huffington Post will speed away from WaPoop and NYT like a runaway train. Note that reader stats for the Dinosaurs are estimated (to their maximum benefit, no doubt).
It was as brilliant for Ariana to hire Froomkin as it was mind-numbingly stupid for WaPoop to have first tried to minimize him and second, to have fired him.
I don’t care much for Huff Po’s tabloid appearance and its many Twitter-deep posts either.
I suspect adding meat to its bones – as well as establishing a full-blown DC bureau – was one of the reasons Arianna didn’t mention for why she hired Dan so quickly.
Completely OT – but I didn’t know that Anthrax War was available on youtube, but it is (some of the David Kelly stories talk about this documentary)
Part I here
Just in case you missed it, Mary, back on the HPSCI Stern Letter thread, Lindy @57 provided this link: “There’s a diary up on DK about David Kelly’s death (UK bio-weapons inspector).”
HuffPo is being added back into my bookmarks list…
Good to see F. has landed on his feet, running!
We may not have gotten Froomkin but we DO have EW.
Chip in a little more if you can, pups. We gotta get that fundraiser guage on the uptick again!
An excellent move. (after a brief vacation!)
The folks Dan was pissing off don’t care — when he left WAPO they were able stop the “lalalalalala I can’t hear you!”
To them he’s still silenced, suiting WAPO’s short term agenda. And no, I don’t want to hear about stock price or company performance. Lalalalalalala!
I’m looking forward to Dan’s news analysis and especially, his media criticism.
I hope he’ll have his own rss feed. My computer doesn’t like all the cpu sucking ads that run on HuffPo. Loading pages is an exercise in …… p . a .. t .. i . .. e …. n ….. c …… e.
This is a watershed moment, and you just knew that the media-wise lady who helped assure EW’s credential for access to liveblog the Libby trial would make it happen. Years from now we will look back on l’affaire de Froomkin as another huge marker in the flight of public trust from Village press.
bingo
huzzah for Huffpo
cheers for Dan Froomkin
good on them both and I hope they continue to be a sore spot for the paleojournalism firms.
Anderson Cooper needs a briefing in Live Blog 101.
Who will explain to him that Live Blog means there is an author who witnesses the events in person or by audio or video feed and writes about what transpires. Cooper seems think live blog means setting-up a trash talk thread but without the setup… that is a forum for comments:
AC360 live-blog-jacksons-memorial-service
The Squint is the epitome of today’s MSM … nothing to say and all the time in the World to say it !
Back to Gitmo trials:
“WASHINGTON, July 7 (Reuters) – The Obama administration said on Tuesday that only voluntary statements by foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison should be used as evidence at their military trials or else convictions could be reversed on appeal.”
Good News re Froomkin having a publishing venue.
For me, bad news it had to be HuffPo — It started off so well, then began rapidly descending into Tabloid Junk, interspersed with few and far between original reporting. Iran elections are one of those notable exceptions.
I don’t quite understand why HuffPo gets any respect at all in the left blogosohere. A more liberal drudge with NY Post and TMZ added and a bunch of guest columnists who generally speaking don’t have much in the way of enduring commentary… Average shelf-life there: about 18 hours, before new salacious stuff screams from the pictured headlines atop each page.
Maybe with Froomkin there he can make it a respectable joint. But to do so, they’d also have to reformat to something that takes itself just a bit more seriously.
My view of Arianna plummeted with the past year of Huffington Post. It’s one thing to ensure a profitable venture — so that people like Froomkin CAN be hired. It’s another to present 50-75% junk everyday in order to do so.
There’s an upside to the tabloid-ish appearance of HuffPo, though: people who might only come for the tabloid stuff are exposed to the political content they might not otherwise get at places like Perez Hilton or GoFugYourself.
Pulling together both the dishy and the wonky content makes politics more accessible to the younger voter as well as the the disaffected folks who might not have participated in politics in the past.
Just skim past the tabloid stuff. You’ll find there are some serious people who’ve already been populating the pages.
And Nico. Good gravy, what would coverage of Iran post-election have been like without him crunching away, making HuffPo the place to be? This was the intersection of the tabloid, the political and the blog; we’ll continue to see more of this, including copycatters.
And bad copycats will fail and stink; personally, I’d rather weed past HuffPo’s tab content than try and stomach WSJ liveblogging of MJ’s memorial today. Yeesh…now that’s just plain bad.
It’s the old Rolling Stone model. Fluff, fashion and a few real stories. How well some of that meshes with a philosophy of social change is dubious.
Look, I’m proof that the stuff can work. Way back in the day, when I could have been reading other pure crap like women’s magazines or decorating magazines, I read Rolling Stone and Playboy.
Which meant I cut my teeth on the likes of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, some really phenomenal interviews by Playboy contributors, and excellent short stories in what are generally considered pop culture outlets. Rolling Stone remains the home of some solid political columns with an attitude, like that of Matt Taibbi; I’m sure some of us have pointed to or discussed his work as just one example.
For men like my spouse who catches the news in 30 seconds at a time between flights in airports and in emails spammed to his Blackberry by moronic corporate friends, content which shows up in pop culture outlets may be the only thing that breaks through the fog of info in which he lives. HuffPo might have to do, and it might just do it.
Now if only Arianna could pull together the kind of short fiction Playboy once had, like Atwood, Oates, Dick, Ellison, Bradbury…
[edit: just dawned on me that Robert Scheer, who did the only Playboy interview of a presidential candidate in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, is a contributor at HuffPo. Wonder who else I’ve missed?]
bell @22
me neither.
huffington post is a smart-alec, mainstream look-alike, with a way-too-busy front page, a penchant for giving a voice to “famous people” with absolutely nothing useful to contribute to the public discourse, and an editorial predilection to exploit science and sex to sell.
still,
they do provide a home for a few educational voices –
if these can be heard amidst all the “noise” (in an information technology sense) the site generates.
and rhfactor @42
the problem is, i suspect, as with all media, is the editors and producers. imagination and daring is NOT their game. neither is being too far ahead of the herd. they are careerists with mortgages to pay and years to go before they could take a risk – but then they are not constitutionally inclined to take a risk.
and then there this this from bob somerby, the diogenes of american political journalism:
[… THE DUMBNESS OF THE WHALE/Washington Post edition: We hadn’t read The Huffington Post in some time. Yesterday, when we went there, we remembered why.
Until recent decades, the public discourse was maintained by a carefully picked “elite”—the Edward R. Murrow crowd. Regular rubes weren’t allowed to take part in these august discussions.
At yesterday’s Huffington Post, we began to remember why.
No, it really doesn’t make sense to report on “rumors”—or to cry, weep, sob and complain when the subject of your “rumors” tells you that you’ll have to stop. (For the most part, even the mainstream press corps doesn’t report on “rumors”—for example, by telling us how many weeks the “rumors” have been in circulation.) And Paul Begala’s post was simply the work of a new, degraded man—a person who has begun to talk way down to the crowd. (In the past, that wasn’t his way.) Meanwhile, did we say, just yesterday, that elite criticism of Palin has often been designed to tag her as “trailer trash?” Those kinds of elites are at HuffPo too, we saw when we read this sad, inane post. Headline: “Reading the Pictures: Palin Proud To Be Trash.” … ]
http://www.dailyhowler.com/index.shtml