Arianna Huffington on the desperation of Journalism 2009

Full text of Arianna Huffington’s ‘Desperate metaphors, desperate revenue models, and the desperate need for better journalism’ speech, made at a Federal Trade Commission event in Washington DC – at this link. An extract:

“So now sites that aggregate the news have become, in the words of Rupert Murdoch and his team, ‘parasites,’ ‘content kleptomaniacs,’ ‘vampires,’ ‘tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internets,’ and, of course, thieves who ‘steal all our copyright.’

“It’s the news industry equivalent of ‘your mama wears army boots!’ Although, not quite as persuasive.

“In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They’d rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.”

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