Huffington Post Pulitzer Challenges Assumptions about Social Audiences
The Huffington Post may be hanging with The New York Times in the Pulitzer Prize club, but the pair couldn’t be more different:
- The Huffington Post. Started in 2005. Strictly online. (Technically, it’s a blog. The first ever to win a Pulitzer). Often mocked: Is it “real” journalism?
- The New York Times. Founded in 1851. Challenged by the online environment. Well-respected. Winner of more than 100 Pulitzer Prizes. The gold standard for journalism.
So it seems like The Huffington Post can’t possibly attend the same parties as The New York Times, right? Don’t be so sure.
Based on statistics valued in the modern media landscape, the very popular blog holds its own against the legend. HuffPo has roughly 1/4th the Facebook fan base of the NYT (574K vs. 2.1 million), but take a look at the talking about stats captured today: 40K for the NYT compared with nearly twice that – 77K – for HuffPo. The NYT app on Facebook has 100K monthly users, a figure dwarfed by HuffPo, which has 1.5 million monthly users. And according to this article from The Economist, at the beginning of 2012 The Huffington Post approached 60 million unique visitors each month worldwide, several million ahead of The New York Times.
As validating as the Prize may be for The Huffington Post and modern media (which despite being able to compete for readers rarely receive accolades like traditional media do), the Prize also redeems social audiences. The Huffington Post’s award-winning piece, Beyond The Battlefield, challenges some stereotypes about social audiences and the kind of content they seek. For example:
- Online audiences only want fluff. / “Beyond The Battlefield” is not light reading. It’s hard to get through. Online audiences can stick with difficult subjects. They’re willing invest emotion.
- Readers don’t have an attention span on the web. / Each piece in the Battlefield series is a number of pages, and there are 10 parts. Readers will take time with content that is meaningful and memorable.
- Blog readers aren’t sophisticated, so it’s OK to slap together content. / As HuffPo Executive Editor Timothy L. O’Brien describes it, “Beyond the Battlefield” is a collaboration among a writer, a video producer, designers of info-graphics and interactive data, a photographer and an editor. And it matters that the author, David Wood, is a journalist with more than 40 years experience. Stringent standards and ethics for writing and reporting that are important for readers of traditional media are just as important to blog readers.
There’s room for improvement to the model, of course. In 2011, the publication faced writer strikes (Newspaper Guild Asks Writers to Boycott Huffington Post), and though some have been dropped, work remains in the online environment on how to structure arrangements between contributors and site owners when it comes to compensation and ownership.
But awarding a Pulitzer to a blog is a big deal. It encourages even more amazing content.
So it turns out blogging’s not just for kids, after all. It’s not just a hobby. It’s not just “for fun.” Blogging – and all other content development – can be serious business. It can be incredibly impactful. And with a whole new generation consuming its news primarily on-line, the question about legitimacy (does HuffPo deserve to sit alongside the NYT?) will likely go away entirely.
