“The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events,” reports Advertising Age.
Mediabistro carries a memo from the Huffington Post calling on its blogging contributors to ‘think local’ as it prepares to launch a local edition for Los Angeles.
The site has already expanded to cover Chicago and Denver, but, as mediabistro points out, the memo states: “‘As always, there are no deadlines or quotas.’ Or money”
The Huffington Post claims that one of its first investigative projects shows evidence of a ‘new alliance between professional reporters and citizens who have a high interest or expertise in a particular topic’:
“Several weeks ago, as one of our first investigative projects, we set out to explore how insurance companies decide which claims to approve or deny. Regulators, lawmakers and policy makers seem to be in the dark about that important aspect of the health care system, since insurance companies generally are not required to disclose their rules, methods or records about claims. Investigative Fund reporter Danielle Ivory wrote about this lack of available data and invited citizen journalists to help us investigate. Hundreds of people volunteered. And they’ve already helped us extend and deepen our journalism. Many have volunteered personal tales about their dealings with insurers. Others are health professionals and insurance insiders with direct experience in the claims process.”
HuffPost’s ‘Game Changers’ feature is selecting 100 ‘innovators, visionaries, and leaders’ who are ‘harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world’.
One of its picks is Charlie Tillinghast, president and publisher of MSNBC.com; HuffPo picked out this quote of his:
“There are no TV journalists anymore. There are videojournalists. When somebody from NBC News goes out in the field (…) they’re shooting a piece that will show up on ‘Nightly,’ on MSNBC cable, on MSNBC.com, on a mobile device. The point is it’s all about video and all the places that people can watch video.”
The Huffington Post is applying A/B testing to some of its headlines, reports the Nieman Journalism Lab.
“Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.”
Beet TV recorded this interview with Jose Antonio Vargas, the former Washington Post reporter now editing the Huffington Post’s new technology section that launched on Monday. Technology is anthropology, Vargas says.
The Huffington Post has launched its third local site, as expected, for Denver, Colorado.
An introduction from Ethan Axelrod, HuffPo’s Denver editor, explains the thinking behind launch in Denver and not another US city – namely the political importance of the state and Denver’s position as a destination for young professionals and businesses, he says.
The site is also planning launches of new technology, sport (end of October) and books (October 5) verticals – a move examined by the New York Observer:
“The advantage to adding verticals ad infinitum to general-interest websites is simple: they make it easy for web designers to mimic that familiar feeling of pulling out the business pages or flipping to the top sports story in traditional print newspapers. Drilling down on one topic at a time and carefully tailoring content by subject makes it easier for visitors to read what they want to and for advertisers to reach a specific, targeted audience,” the Observer reports.
Being able to roll-out new sections and topic pages quickly may suggest a landgrab approach towards attracting users.
As usability expert Jakob Nielsen tells the Observer, these sections allow sites to ‘scoop up’ users with specific interests and perhaps attract them to other parts of the site. To do this however, the content these sections offer must be more than just a filtering of the broader site.
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Wow. The Huffington Post is taking the crowdsourcing news strategy one step further still:
Josh Young (@jny2), recently appointed social news editor for the HuffPo, tweeted:
“We’re crowdsourcing our latest Joe Wilson hed at http://huffingtonpost.com We came up with “No, YOU Lie” Can you do better? #headlinehelp”
(Via @jayrosen_nyu / Mediaite.com)
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