The site’s annual ‘‘What Time Is the Super Bowl?’’ post has become such a famous example of S.E.O.-driven non-news that other media outlets have written half-disgusted, half-admiring posts dissecting its history.
.. The Huffington Post brought a radical data-driven methodology to its home page, automatically moving popular stories to more prominent spaces and A-B testing its headlines. The site’s editorial director, Danny Shea, demonstrated to me how this works a few months ago, opening an online dashboard and pulling up an article about General Motors. One headline was ‘‘How GM Silenced a Whistleblower.’’ Another read ‘‘How GM Bullied a Whistleblower.’’ The site had automatically shown different headlines to different readers and found that ‘‘Silence’’ was outperforming ‘‘Bully.’’ So ‘‘Silence’’ it would be. It’s this sort of obsessive data analysis that has helped web-headline writing become so viscerally effective.
.. Its properties collectively push out about 1,900 posts per day. In 2013, Digiday estimated that BuzzFeed, by contrast, was putting out 373 posts per day, The Times 350 per day and Slate 60 per day. (At the time, The Huffington Post was publishing 1,200 posts per day.)
.. ‘‘By any sane definition of success,’’ she told the crowd that day in New Haven, ‘‘if you are lying in your office in a pool of blood, you are not a success.’’
.. At one AOL meeting with brand managers, Armstrong ribbed his underlings by recounting how Huffington called him on a Sunday to tell him what was wrong with AOL’s home page. Why had no one else done that?
.. Huffington, whose contract with AOL expired earlier in the year, wanted guarantees that Verizon would finance the site’s growth and keep its hands off articles with which it may have a difference of opinion — those on net neutrality, for instance.
.. One former A-Teamer recalled loading The Huffington Post on Huffington’s computer when she showed up at the office.
‘‘Arianna doesn’t surf the web,’’ the former A-Teamer explained. ‘‘She reads stories that people send on her iPhone, and she sends and receives emails on her BlackBerry. But I’ve never seen her on a computer, surfing the web.’’ Huffington said that this is not true, and stated that she ditched her BlackBerry nearly two years ago. But more than a dozen former and current Huffington Post staff members said they had never seen her so much as open a web browser.
.. Just about everyone works continuously, whether you’re at the office or not,’’ one former employee said. ‘‘That little green light that says you’re available on Gchat is what matters.’’
.. Her oft-repeated claim to sleep eight hours a night notwithstanding, she rarely seems to be idle. Emails from her cease, several ex-employees told me, only between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.
.. ‘‘Everyone’s stock is shooting up or falling at any given moment, so everyone is rattled with uncertainty and insecurity,’’ one former employee said. ‘‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’’
.. Only someone with her unique combination of drive and outward placidity could run a tremendously popular, hugely productive website and then begin a second career chastening us for our addiction to the Internet.
A Former Israeli Ambassador Takes Aim at Obama—and American Jewry
Goldberg: You yourself write in the book that Obama has given amazing pro-Zionist speeches, that there are different moments when he’s said things about Israel that are quite meaningful.
Oren: I mentioned one of his speeches—I think at the UN in [September] 2011—which is probably one of the most Zionist speeches ever given by an American president—
Goldberg: —Right. This doesn’t come through in your op-eds. I get it, these op-eds have to have an argument, but—
Oren: —And they can’t be too subtle. You have 700 words to make a subtle argument. In that article about Obama abandoning Israel, I talk about—
.. what I have a problem with is Jewish journalists who say, “I’m Jewish, but I’m not those Jews.”
Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?
A recent in-house survey found that nearly one in every seven items posted on it comes from the Associated Press, with which it has a contract.
.. In a parting memo, Goodman (who had served as executive business editor) wrote of “a widespread sense” at his team “that the HuffPost is no longer fully committed to original reporting; that in a system governed largely by metrics, deep reporting and quality writing weigh in as a lack of productivity.”
.. In March, Tucker Carlson removed a column that one of his bloggers, Mickey Kaus (a pioneer of the form), had posted that was critical of Fox News. Kaus resigned, and Carlson later acknowledged that he would not allow The Daily Caller to run anything critical of Fox (where he’s also an anchor).
.. Imagine, for instance, if ProPublica set up a database documenting the links between money, power, and ideas in America and beyond. One could enter the name of a mogul—say, hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, or BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink, or Carlyle Group cofounder David Rubenstein—and find out at once the assets he controls, the boards he sits on, the philanthropies he supports, the politicians he contributes to, the lawyers and lobbies that represent him. Clicking on each link would take one to a new page showing all the pertinent information about the company, board, or philanthropy in question. Proceeding through the labyrinth could help lay bare the composition, shape, and reach of the global oligarchy—the one percent of the one percent. That data could in turn provide the basis for countless follow-up investigations by not only ProPublica but also other journalists as well as activists and scholars.
The Godfather of Clickbait
In a way, the sorts of headlines that Vinnie wrote anticipated the headlines we now see on the Internet. Vinnie’s efforts were often better—as were those of other talented headline writers at the Post. But, in combining succinctness, irony, and absurdism, the Post’s headlines fashioned a model that editors at popular Internet news sites, in their never-ending efforts to attract clicks, often seek to emulate.