Howard Fineman, a reporter at Newsweek for 30 years, is joining the Huffington Post. Fineman will become a senior editor for HuffPo. ReadWriteWeb comments on the number of Newsweek journalists who have left the title since its sale by the Washington Post Company to businessman Sidney Harman and the new homes many have found with new media titles.
Since its launch in October 2009, Hybrid News’ Asian Correspondent has built up a following of one million unique users per month, founder and managing director James Craven [below left] told Journalism.co.uk last week. 
The site received a traffic boost when blogger ‘Bangkok Pundit’ live-blogged the Red Shirt protests, with over 60,000 uniques over one weekend. “This month we will get past one million unique visitors,” says Craven.
A quarter of traffic comes from social media; another 25 per cent from organic search, with the other 50 per cent arriving via aggregation and direct links.
From January to March 2010 his New York based sales team brought in $251,000 in advertising from 35 advertising clients, he says.
As we reported in October, Craven wants the site to be a Huffington Post for Asia, but since then his ambition has developed further. Without revealing exactly what is in store, Craven says they are planning another online product, possibly geographical or topical.
Where Asian Correspondent differs from HuffPo is in author compensation. Unlike Adriana Huffington’s site, which relies on unpaid contributors, Asian Correspondent pays its 38 freelance contributors – on average £2-300 per month, Craven says.
He’s optimistic for the growth of its advertising model: integrated packages that include advertising and the opportunity for guest blogs or interviews. The latter doesn’t affect the site’s editorial content, Craven says, because it’s “clearly a sponsored post.”
Asian Correspondent has developed an advertising platform for southeastasia.org, with customised sponsorship of destination guides. Universities have also proved strong advertising clients for the company.
Christian Science Monitor reports on a worrying mistake:
Earlier today, as news of the alleged identity of the would-be Times Square bomber rocketed around the web, a reporter at the Huffington Post published a screen shot from the Facebook page of a man named Faisal Shahzad. It made sense: Shahzad, a Shelton, Conn., resident, had been identified by law enforcement after he was hauled off an airplane preparing to depart Kennedy Airport. But the Huffington Post got the wrong Faisal Shahzad – a fact noted by several bloggers, including Glen Runciter of Gawker.
The Huffington Post has launched a new US politics service, the “HuffPost Hill”, a daily newsletter “which aims to whisk readers into evening with a free, modern, e-mail version of an evening newspaper,” reports MediaBistro.
It harkens back to an era that publication editors believe still ought to exist.
New York Times technology reporter Richard Pérez-Peña examines the problem of anonymous comments being widely permitted on news sites. With the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal announcing plans to revise their comment systems, will other mainstream news organisations begin to reconsider this well-established policy?
No one doubts that there is a legitimate value in letting people express opinions that may get them in trouble at work, or may even offend their neighbours, without having to give their names, said William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia’s journalism school.
“But a lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a bar room brawl, with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher,” he said. “People who might have something useful to say are less willing to participate in boards where the tomatoes are being thrown.”
The Huffington Post is launching a separate Twitter edition of its site, designed to blend news items from the main site with Twitter feeds selected by Huff Post editors. The new edition also features stories that are ‘hot on Twitter’.
All 19 Huff Post verticals now have a distinct Twitter version – see examples of the Media, Technology, and Politics sections at these links – and a Twitter edition homepage launches soon. Visitors to the site can follow links on each original section’s masthead to switch to its Twitter version.
Eric Hippeau, CEO of Huff Post, said:
By creating a Twitter edition of HuffPost, we’re seeking to give our engaged audience another exciting way to follow the news in real-time. Our goal is to build a destination for users to unlock all that’s happening on Twitter in the areas of most interest to them.
#followjourn: Patrick Galey
Who? Home news reporter for The Daily Star in Beirut, Lebanon, and Huffington Post blogger
Where? Galey has his own blog, Patrick Galey, where he writes about issues and events in Lebanon. His work appears here on the Lebanon Daily Star website, and here on the Huffington Post, where he covers security, environment and social development issues. Galey also contributed to the Guardian late last year, Caught Up in Lebanon’s Motorbike Ban.
Patrick Galey on journalisted.com
Contact? @patrickgaley
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Bill Lucey shares some ideas from the US on reinventing redundant journalists’ careers, over on the Huffington Post. Even if you’re older, forget about age and stay young at heart, he says.
[B]efore raising the white flag and crying uncle, there are plenty of resources available online, offering video tutorials, webinars, and career tips to those out of work newspaper employees; trying to acquire new skills and become more marketable.
Starting this week, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.
NYT explore new avenues with another hyperlocal blog
Starting off small today, with news that the New York Times is launching another hyperlocal blog. this time in conjunction with students from New York University (NYU).
The new blog, which will report on New York’s East Village, will come under the Times’ URL but be developed and launched by students from the NYU Studio 20 Journalism Masters programme.
Two NY hyperlocals were launched by the paper last year under a channel called ‘The Local’. One covers Clinton Hill and Fort Greene in Brooklyn, the other Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange in New Jersey. Those blogs featured student contributions from the start, but were helmed by Times staff (although the former was recently turned over to students from CUNY). The new East Village blog is edited by a Times staffer but will be largely overseen, from inception to launch, by NYU students.
Jessica Roy, blogger at NYULocal and member of the East Village project said:
While the site will function in a similar way to the hyperlocal sites the Times already has running in Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill and Maplewood, this will be the first time journalism students will be heavily involved in the site’s content and design process before the launch.
It will be interesting to see how this ties in with the reported NYT plans to hide their blogs away behind a paywall. Can the Freakonomics blog, Paul Krugman, and other NYT blog big-hitters tempt readers to pay? Can a bunch of students from NYU?
Arianna Huffington admits spending “a lot of time” on college campuses
The NYT are not the only ones hanging around campuses and jumping in bed with students, “I’ve spent a lot of time on campuses lately” admits Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.
But Arianna is not, apparently, just trying to recapture a youth she threw away on “promise, passion, intellectual curiosity, and vitality”. She is referring to the launch of HuffPost College, a new section of the Huffington Post devoted to the promising, passionate, intellectually curious, and vital students out there, and presumably to the billions of normal students too.
Edited by Jose Antonio Vargas, our Tech and Innovations editor, with the help of Leah Finnegan, a recent graduate of the University of Texas and the former editor of the Daily Texan, HuffPost College is designed to be a virtual hub for college life, bringing you original and cross-posted material from a growing list of college newspapers.
“Announcing HuffPost College: No SAT scores or admission essays needed” reads Arianna’s headline.
Just an internet connection then, which everyone in America must have by now, right? Hmmm…. Published yesterday, the results of an FCC study into internet use in America show that a third of the population don’t have broadband internet access – some 93 million – and the majority of those don’t have any access whatsoever.
Here is John Horrigan, who oversaw the survey for the FCC, making the findings sound impressively grotesque:
Overall internet penetration has been steady in the mid-70 to upper 70 per cent range over the last five years. Now we’re at a point where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significant measure, you really have to start to eat into the segment of non-internet-users.
Fortunately for Arianna Huffington, those remaining blissfully un-penetrated (albeit in danger of being eaten into by hungry internet providers) are “disproportionately older and more likely to live in rural areas”, and not the vigourous youth, who are probably desperate to spend their time out of college at home reading about college.
Shatner to play Twitterer
One elderly American well in tune with all things online is Justin Halpern’s dad. Even if he doesn’t quite get why. Justin Halpern’s dad is the man behind Justin Halpern’s Twitter account, “Shit My Dad Says.” Although this is slightly old story already, news that William Shatner will be playing an curmudgeonly, 74 year-old man whose live-in 29 year-old son tweets “shit that he says” is too ridiculous to pass up. If CBS are in luck, the account’s 1,187,371 followers, and many more, will tune in to hear William Shatner say this:
A parent’s only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed.
And many, many other 140-character pearls of wisdom far too rude for the very mild-mannered Journalism.co.uk. I for one prefer Justin Halpern’s dad’s personal choice of James Earl Jones, and applaud his straight talking response to suggestions that colour is an issue.
He wanted James Earl Jones to play him. I was like, ‘But you’re white.’ He was like, ‘Well, we don’t have to be! Who gives a [censored]? You asked me who I thought, and that’s who I think.’
Who could possibly resist the powerful combination of Halpern Snr’s coarse tweets and Darth Vader’s husky voice?
Largest YouTube content provider reaches 1 billion views
One million followers is an impressive landmark in the Twitterverse, it puts you up there in the Twittersphere with such luminaries as Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher. It’s about 28,000 times as many as I have. Demand Media went a thousand times better than that though in YouTube terms yesterday, with its billionth view.
According to its site, the company, which has about 500 staff and is based in Santa Monica, provides “social media solutions that consumers really want”. Demand is the largest content supplier to YouTube, owning around 170,000 videos available on the site.
Co-founder of Demand Shawn Colo discusses the YouTube platform and the company’s media strategy, courtesy of Beet.TV.
Rampant cutbacks trumped by loaded shotgun
Finally, from Editor & Publisher, the happy news that redundancy is no longer the most frightening thing in the newsroom.
Employees at the Grand Forks Herald, Chicago, were more than a little surprised to find a loaded shotgun in a closet at the paper’s head offices.
“No notes, no threats, no nothing – just a loaded shotgun in a case in a closet in a common area, five rounds in it,” Grand Forks Police Lt. Grant Schiller said.
For those staffers who may not have already jumped to this conclusion, Herald editor Mike Jacobs made it clear that: “Carrying a loaded gun into the building is a dismissible offense.”
Newspaper journalists, in an age when your profession is almost a dismissable offence in itself, please, leave your loaded shotguns at home.
Image of East Village by Joe Madonna
Image of weapons ban sign by Dan4th
The Huffington Post launched its anticipated college section yesterday – original and cross-posted material on student and university life in the US from more than 60 college newspaper partners.
HuffPost College features voices from colleges and universities all around the country and offers a real-time snapshot of what’s going on in the lives of the nation’s 19 million college students – from coverage of the latest trends and sports happenings to more serious issues such as freedom of expression on campus and the rising cost of tuition.
HuffPo has also brought recent graduates in to help edit and run the microsite – a good opportunity for US student journalists to showcase their work and a ready-made specialist audience for the site to engage with.