“Unless you’re selling porn – especially weird porn – I would not go the subscription route,” Ariana Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, told the All Things D conference last week.
In the video below with the Washington Post’s Katharine Weymouth, Huffington also talks about the development of HuffPo: half of the site’s traffic now comes from non-political stories; the last round of funding is going into the investigative journalism fund, local verticals and expansion; the site is breaking even.
But what Ariana won’t admit is the fact that she uses journalistic work of others media. For example, her bloggers take one or two paragraphs from other news article, write some fluff before and after, and publish that under their own headline stuffed with keywords.
Yes, it is not illegal to quote one paragraph, but we know that news are written the way that usually the first paragraphs can sum up the whole article. So in many of their articles, the real work was done by some other media. So I say they are able to break even because they are capitalizing on the work of other media journalists and they would not survive without them. But Ariana will not mention that.