Chautauqua, Day 3: Arianna Huffington

In an IM earlier this morning, I told my friend Curt that I would be heading into the Chautauqua lecture by Arianna Huffington. He said, “Heh… make sure you slap her for me.”

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huffington with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are correct. I’m just not sure which two.

Obviously, she was here to contribute to the discussion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bashing. To be sure, there’s been a boatload of each. But while the other folks in the discussion were from inside the fold, working in traditional media newsrooms and desperately trying to wrap their arms around this non-traditional whatnot, Huffington is coming at it from a different angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she contends hers is one of the highest trafficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a candle to the other representatives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rankings comparing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bottom).

I’ve always had trouble with the fact that her site is not much more than linkbait — limited original editorial content sandwiching link after link to traditional media outlets. But if what she says comes to pass, the Huffington Post might just become a significant player in the media landscape.

While those in the mainstream media (”MSM” as she calls them), are working diligently to drive more of their content to some level of engagement online, she’s talking about opening brinck and mortar news bureaus of bloggers and other citizen journalists and researchers all driving to support the huffingtonpost.com so-called news machine.

This would be an interesting convergence of one massive groundswell of disorganized force crashing again a weathered and heavily beaten shore. But it just may go to support her central thesis: all media will survive. Print is not on it’s last breath, nor is broadcast. Nor is integrity or editorial ethic. We’re just all working to figure out new ways to use them.

Traditional media isn’t helping itself in this transition, however. She pounded on the state of the industry with the build-up to the war in Iraq, reminding the audience of known-erroneous information published in guise of fact turned journalists into “stenographers to power to a very large extent.”

If the country can’t trust traditional media to give us the straight dope on such things, we’ll turn to whomever steps up to the mic (nod to Michael J. Fox in that movie where he was Cheif of Staff to Michael Douglas for allowing me to ape that line poorly).

And it’s Huffington’s turn at the mic, to be sure.

Her talk was all about blogs, the blogosphere, technology, new media, and so on. Which made it all the more ironic that the first question in the Q&A was, “For those of us … who are Internet-impaired, would you define the term ‘blog’ and ‘blogger,’ and tell us what the difference in a blog and a website?”

Good question. There went the last hour.

Still, this is a woman who knows something about managing one’s reputation online. She converted from Republican to Democrat ten years ago and weathered a stream of slings and arrows aimed squarely at her.

I write in the book, I have a whole chapter, on how hard it is to change your mind in public. Because what happens is your friends really don’t what to have anything to do with you because they feel abandoned, and the people in whose direction you are going don’t trust you.

Huffington is carrying an important torch for those of us who’ve chosen to be online, and this audience is representative of a significant portion of the world population who don’t understand the online ecosystem, don’t recognize the importance of blogs to newsgathering and public commentary, and they don’t know where to begin to find the good ones. That this firey Greek is helping dead-tree consumers to find new outlets, then she’s doing her job right.