The Huffington Post has signed up with Facebook Connect to offer its users the ability to comment on news stories from the site and share them on Facebook via new profile pages on the HuffPo site.
The ‘social news’ service will also allow users to find out which of their Facebook friends are also reading HuffPo.
The launch is part of a bigger move towards personalised news, says founder Ariana Huffington, and more personalisation and social features are in the pipeline.
“The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news. News has become an important element of community – something around which we gather, connect, and converse,” writes Huffingotn.
America has lost a top celebrity anchorman, whose news delivery was so influential, he came to be called ‘the most trusted man in America’.
He died peacefully at his home, on Friday July 17, at the age of 92.
Walter Cronkite was an anchorman for CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, reading news including a wide range of historical events: the moon landings, Watergate, John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam war.
He had a reassuring manner of delivering the news that inspired confidence and trust in the audience. Every evening 70 million Americans heard him deliver his broadcast, which invariably concluded with the parting words “And that’s the way it is.”
He was born Walter Leland Cronkite Jr on November 4th, 1916 in St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of a dentist. As a teenager, his family moved to Houston, where he had his first junior reporter job at The Houston Post – and at the same time delivering the very paper for which he worked.
Known for his trademark clipped moustache and grave voice, he was affectionately known as Uncle Walt, owing to a resemblance to Walt Disney. Despite his popularity, Cronkite was uncomfortable with his celebrity status and declined a proposal for a Walter Cronkite fan club saying: “I don’t think news people ought to have fan clubs.” He also brushed aside suggestions for him to stand for vice-president, even president. The only job he had ever wanted was that of reporter.
No amount of friendship or adulation could compromise Cronkite’s journalistic integrity. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said, “When I wanted to make a point Cronkite was the first person I would call. I was sure I was getting a fair interview – tough but fair.”
Some of Cronkite’s finest moments:
1963: Assassination of President John F . Kennedy: Walter Cronkite famously displays a rare show of emotion, taking off his glasses to fight back tears as he announces the death of President Kennedy. Video below:
1968: Vietnam War: After visiting Vietnam in 1968, he called the war ‘a stalemate’ and made his pro-peace stance clear. His views were so influential that, having watched the broadcast, the then US President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, “I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Two weeks later Johnson resigned and announced he would not stand for re-election. Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War.
1969: Apolo 11’s landing on the moon: His coverage of the landing made CBS’ footage of the first moonwalk a favourite in America. Walter Cronkite and the landing on the moon.
1977: Cronkite’s interview with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin led to Sadat visiting Jerusalem and signing the peace accords the following year at Camp David.
Cronkite retired from from the CBS evening news programme in 1981, handing it over to Dan Rather, but continued producing special reports for the CBS network and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. In 1983 he covered the general elections in the UK for ITV and interviewed Margaret Thatcher.
He is survived by a son, two daughters and four grandsons.
“Journalism is not a profession like engineering, medicine or even law. You can pick up most media skills on the job, or with a few hours of instruction. If you screw up, nobody dies, and nothing collapses. This is why so many – perhaps most – journalism pros have built successful careers without touching J-school, and why many of them considered a J-degree a dubious credential even in the field’s heyday,” writes Richard Sine.
Journalism school deans should cut their intakes to avoid flooding the industry with graduates, who will be eager to take on the role of laid-off staff, for lower pay, he adds.
Jeremy Paxman interviews Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington and the Evening Standard’s Anne McElvoy on the use of non-traditional media/amateur reports from Iran and the concept of ‘curating’ this information as opposed to traditional editing.
McElvoy usefully describes the intersection of as a complex mosaic with each piece contributing subjective information – but information that requires an overview/comparison that can be added by an editor or professional journalist.
You what? The HuffPo doesn’t like links? Well, one in particular: a link to the HuffingtonPost’s site from a spoof site, made by the Washington City Paper for April Fool’s.
“This past Tuesday, City Paper columnist Amanda Hess blasted HuffPo for its nipple- (or is that traffic-) driven priorities, after which City Paper received a request from HuffPo asking it to take down the parody page from its archive. One of its reasons: ‘The official was perturbed,’ writes Wemple, ‘that the parody page that virtually no one has clicked on since April Fool’s contains a link to the Huffington Post site.’ No switching necessary (though perhaps a little bit of baiting) in that headline after all.”
Simon Owens has done a spot-check on the front page of the Huffington Post site, at 8pm on Tuesday June 2, to ascertain how many HuffPo headlines are of the reporters’ own making.
He explains how he defines ‘original reporting’ in the Bloggasm post, and here’s what he found:
“There were a total of 77 headlines on the front page of the Huffington Post when I conducted the survey. Of those, four headlines simply linked to news outlets offsite. There were five HuffPo stories that contained original reporting. There were 55 HuffPo stories that simply expressed opinion and/or summarized content from other outlets. The remaining 13 stories were reprinted wire copy.
“So this means that approximately 6 per cent of the HuffPo stories on the front page tonight contained original reporting. This is likely significantly fewer originally reported stories than you’d find on most major newspaper websites, including the New York Times, LA Times and the Washington Post.”
“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.
“(…) by mid [Sunday] afternoon she [Maureen Dowd] she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost [sic] Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of ‘plagiarism’ ensued.
“By early evening, Dowd had admitted wrongdoing, in an email to Huffington Post, and said she wanted to apologize to [Josh] Marshall. She also said that the Times would issue a correction tomorrow – and the copy was changed in her column to attribute the line of thought to Marshall.
“She seemed to be suggesting, however, that she had merely heard the line of argument from a friend, who did not attribute it to Marshall. This wouldn’t explain, however, why the rather lengthy sentence, a full paragraph, matched Marshall’s writing virtually word for word.”
You know how media companies get a hard time for how they treat the ‘workies’? Especially because most internships are unpaid – you might get expenses if you’re lucky. Well, Huffington Post has gone one step futher, by putting up an internship for charity auction – offering bidders the chance to ‘jumpstart their career in the blogosphere’. Ten bids had been placed at the time of writing; the last one was for $13,000. All proceeds go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
Interesting spot from the past: Anya Kamenetz writing at HuffPo in 2006 on ‘the high cost of unpaid internships’:
“Now you see businesses of all sizes taking on interns, openly for the free labor. I have been at & heard of publications & publishers where they save the slush pile all year for the summer interns to go through. And Gawker, which doesn’t pay its own interns, loves to post jobads wherein well-paid magazine editors, artists, and others seek full-time assistants for free.”
It reminds Journalism.co.uk of prizes offered in the the Independent’s annual charity auctions. In those, you bid to hang out with the Indy’s editors, correspondents and columnists (yes, people coughed up good money to hang out with the likes of Street-Porter, Emin and Kelner), and the lucky victors (a couple listed below) once got to spend a whole day at the office!
Lot 1: Hold the Front Page
Ever wondered how a daily newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works from morning conference to the nail-biting deadline. Meet the staff and marvel at their cool professionalism, creative brilliance and unusual fashion sense. Winning bid: £1,750, Frederik Vogels, London.
Lot 1: A Day at the Paper Ever wondered how a daily national newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works for one exciting day, hearing the news agenda at morning conference, watching the tension build as the deadline hour approaches. Meet the glamorous staff and marvel at their camaraderie and coolness under pressure. Winning bid: amar, £2,251.11. (Last year’s winning bid: £1,101)
America has lost a top celebrity anchorman, whose news delivery was so influential, he came to be called ‘the most trusted man in America’.