While you and I were rooting for a couple of rust-belt football teams on TV, scarfing down chips and dip and waiting for those wacky, once-a-year commercials, Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington were actually at the Super Bowl – and doing a deal.
The Green Bay Packers weren’t the only big winners at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas Sunday night. Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, got himself a huge online media player to add to his stable. Huffington and investors in her Huffington Post collection of Web media outlets got a cool $315 million.
Ad Agebroke the story first, and there’s coverage in The New York Times and the Washington Post, among other places. And for the angles on how the transaction affects minority journalists as well as minority news consumers, check out the online column by Richard Prince.
(Then there’s the wry reaction from Steve Case, founder of the erstwhile America Online and engineer of its failed merger with Time Warner a decade ago, a merger that Armstrong, a former Google exec, was brought on board to undo a few years ago, creating the once-again-independent AOL. Case, according to PaidContent, tweeted: “Tim Armstrong says ‘1+1 will equal 11’ … Really? That wasn’t my experience.”)
Here at Pressroom Buzz we’re following the story with interest because of the big play that AOL’s local news site Patch has been making in Southeast Wisconsin. We wrote about Patch late last year, and it’s also the subject of the Pressroom column in the March print edition of Milwaukee Magazine, due out later this month.
The AOL-Huffington deal puts Huffington in charge of a lot of AOL content, including Patch. Huffington has demonstrated two important and related skills in online media: the ability to make money at it (HuffPo turned a profit last year, but Columbia Journalism Review has some questions about that.) and the ability to engage readers, millions of whom click on the site, comment about its stories, and link to them in social media and tweets.
She’s also demonstrated skill at scaring the bejeesus out of anyone else in the media because so much of the content she airs costs her absolutely nothing. It’s not accurate to say it’s all free – HuffPo does have a small cadre of paid journalists, some hired away from prestigious legacy media operations (Hello, Howard Fineman, formerly of Newsweek).
By contrast, Patch has been particularly noteworthy in new media ventures for its willingness to hire and pay ($35,000-$50,000 a year by published estimates) the local editors for its individual community sites as well as a staff of regional editors and freelance contributors as well. It’s now a well-storied factoid that as newspapers continue to lay off people (albeit less drastically than a few years ago), Patch has hired more than a thousand people in the last year.
There’s another contrast. HuffPo unabashedly leans left, though not in a doctrinaire way, in its commentary and coverage. It was founded as a sort of liberal alternative to the Drudge Report. Meanwhile it’s clear from Patch stories that it seeks to adhere to the nonpartisan approach of traditional mainstream media, though it’s not stuffy about it. (Locally, the site has instituted an occasional “Paul Ryan Watch” authored by Regional Editor Dustin Block that appears to take an even-handed approach to covering the First District GOP congressman from Janesville.)
One day after the deal is done, it’s too early to know what it will really mean for AOL and its media properties, including Patch. But one can’t help but wonder whether and how HuffPo’s content model might influence the one at Patch, and whether that will be good for readers – or for the people who make their living from journalism.
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Speaking of deals… It might not shake the rafters quite the way the AOL-HuffPo match did, but in case you missed it, Madison’s Capital Times last week announced it was buying WisPolitics.com. Founded 10 years ago by former reporter Jeff Mayers, WisPolitics, which includes WisOpinion.com and WisBusiness.com, was in close to the ground floor of figuring out how to make money on the Web. That’s important for the CapTimes, which went from being a struggling afternoon daily paper with a website to an online-only news site with two free weekly in-print tabloids. As CapTimes editor Paul Fanlund said in the announcement of the deal, “We hope The Cap Times can gain from what WisPolitics has learned about online business models.”
No more jerks? No, but no more “Jerk of the Week” at Shepherd Express. Last week, in an oddly sanctimonious item, the Milwaukee alt-weekly announced it was “indefinitely suspending” (though not retiring) its “Jerk of the Week” column so as “to contribute to bringing greater civility to the public debate.” The announcement says that the format was “too rigid” and that the publication instead would “spend more time looking at the policy and its ramifications and less time attacking the individual promoting the policy.” The item signs off by asking two frequent JOTW honorees – radio talkers Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling – “to please reconsider their approaches so as to focus on the issues and not attack the individuals.”
If the press didn’t tell you, who would? In the Jan. 31 New Yorker, Ben McGrath examines how the NFL has reacted to the growing scrutiny of head injuries in pro football. (The magazine’s been here before, in a 2009 article by Malcolm Gladwell.)
The Pressroom angle in McGrath’s article is this, however: Much of the new scrutiny is thanks to New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz. And the Times itself, along with its sports editor Tom Jolly, deserves some credit.
McGrath tells the story of how Schwarz, then a freelance baseball writer whose big interest was statistics, had arranged a meeting between Jolly and a concussion activist named Chris Nowinski who suspected that brain damage may have led to the suicide of former Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters. Jolly assigned Schwarz the story, which ran on Page 1. After a second story, the Times actually created a beat focusing on nothing but football head injuries and hired Schwarz to fill it. McGrath writes:
“Schwarz was given a full-time position, with no responsibilities other than to broaden his new beat’s focus beyond the N.F.L. to the more than four million amateur athletes who play organized football. Although Schwarz was assigned to the sports desk, the Times framed the story as a matter of public health, akin to tobacco, asbestos, and automobile safety. Schwarz covered high schools, helmets, workmen’s comp, coaching, and so on, earning the nickname Alan Brockovich among friends. ‘You can imagine how many lawyers I hear from,’ he once told me.”
What was the secret to Schwarz’s success? McGrath’s assessment is as unsurprising as it is damning:
“Schwarz may not have been out to get football, but he was clearly less emotionally invested in it than most of his predecessors and peers, who had helped build the sport into the de-facto national pastime with romantic coverage of heroic sacrifice. He was not a fan. ‘I’d been pitching this to reporters for years,’ Nowinski told me, of the head-injury problem in general. ‘People in football told me, point blank, “I don’t want to lose my access.” It literally took a baseball writer who did not care about losing his access, and didn’t want the access, to football.'”
Here’s hoping that journalism professors everywhere are picking up that story and using it as a case study in their classes.
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