《赫芬頓郵報》回歸報紙傳統
|
????美國互聯網第一大報《赫芬頓郵報》（The Huffington Post）的業務很大程度上依賴于綜合和匯編他人采寫的新聞報道。不過本周一，該報的一名科技記者卻因為匯總他人撰寫的報道而受到了停薪留職的處分。就在同一天，該報還推出了新的“《赫芬頓郵報》名人版”和“《赫芬頓郵報》文化版”頁面。 ????這兩起事件突顯了《赫芬頓郵報》目前正在經歷的變化：《赫郵》現在正在調撥人力財力，試圖由匯總信息（廉價）向原創報道（昂貴）的方向轉變。不過在某種程度上，花邊新聞也是必不可少的。 ????《赫郵》的這條路也是許多報紙走過的路。可惜的是，大多數報紙，尤其是那些現在舉步維艱的地區性報紙，都無法復制這一模式，因為這種模式只在規模效應下才能發揮效果。《赫郵》現在已被美國在線（AOL）收購，由于新聞報道網絡上到處都是，因此《赫郵》的利潤率也非常單薄。要想賺夠足夠的錢給新聞記者（便宜）和編輯們（昂貴）發薪水，唯一的辦法就是憑借巨大的訪問量來賣廣告位。 ????許多人批評《赫郵》輕浮膚淺，其創始人阿里安娜?赫芬頓也因此頗受詬病。因此《赫郵》現在貌似是真心想把自己辦成一份嚴肅的大報，報道一些嚴肅的話題（同時在其它某些方面繼續保持膚淺和輕浮）。媒體顧問克萊?舍基上周在一份流傳甚廣的博文中指出，大多數老百姓并不在乎嚴肅的話題，因此，如果你唯一的賣點就是嚴肅，那么你很難賺取足夠的訪問量。沒有訪問量，也就沒有了做嚴肅報道的錢。 ????舍基還指出報紙業務之所以繁榮了幾十年，就是因為報紙是把它的產品打包出售的。大多數人都對體育、八卦、娛樂、漫畫、分類廣告、優惠券等信息很感興趣，相比之下，只有較少的讀者喜歡看新聞——而新聞才是報紙的主要產品，不管是不是有很多人愿意讀新聞，新聞在我們的生活中都是必不可少的。而報紙用來報道嚴肅新聞的錢，其實是來自除了新聞以外的其它內容，因為它們才是讀者真正感興趣的東西；而嚴肅新聞，不管人們是否想看，但確實必要。但是網絡的天性是非集成的，要看分類廣告可以去分類目錄網站Craiglist，要看體育新聞可以去ESPN.com，要看名人緋聞可以上TMZ.com，這就迫使新聞網站在很多情況下只能自力更生。 ????不過《赫郵》卻以某種方式將所有信息重新打包在了一起。《赫郵》稱自己為“網路報紙”是有原因的。它希望通過大量炮制名人的花邊新聞以及其他低俗內容來吸引訪問量，從而為嚴肅報道賺取資金。（筆者請《赫郵》對本文進行評論，但《赫郵》并未回復）而嚴肅的新聞報道反過來可以抬高網站的身價。沒有新聞的報紙是不可能辦好的。 ????當然，“嚴肅”不“嚴肅”也是件仁者見仁的事。當年“疫苗導致自閉癥”的假新聞轟動一時，《赫郵》就是這條假新聞的主要傳播渠道之一（在現在看來，這條假新聞不啻于一個瘋狂的陰謀論。）幾年前，《赫郵》還有一個半正式的專欄，由小羅伯特?肯尼迪（當然，策劃“疫苗導致自閉癥”報道的人里也有他）和布蘭登?德梅勒主筆，專欄的名字就叫：“發掘本周主流媒體遺漏了的新聞”（Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Report）。只不過這個專欄里的每一則新聞都可以鏈接到某份主流媒體的報道，因此有些自打嘴巴的嫌疑。 ????《赫郵》一方面弱化了“拿來主義”的力度，一方面也漸漸在重要新聞事件的報道上變得更加嚴肅。它的新聞、商業和科技頻道可以說至少是中庸的。與此同時，它的新聞報道的質量良莠不齊，從星期一的事件即可看出這一點。 ????被停職的作者名叫艾米?李。據稱導致她停職的那篇文章“簡短而徹底地改寫（或曰重寫）”了AdAge.com的西蒙?杜門科撰寫的一篇文章——杜門科自己如是說。艾米?李沒有在文中添加任何內容，也沒有進行任何分析，屬于純粹的摘抄。 ????網絡小報Gawker網的瑞安?泰特在本周二指出，這種現象并不稀奇，而且他還舉出了另外幾個類似的例子，其中的幾起案例就發生在最近。不過泰特忽略了一件事，那就是隨著《赫郵》朝著更加原創化的方向發展，抄襲的現象正變得越來越罕見。而且泰特也沒有提到另一個事實——《赫郵》并不是唯一一家這樣干的美國媒體。【例如就在本周一，《好萊塢報道》雜志（Hollywood Reporter）刊載了一篇關于歌星布魯斯?斯普林斯汀的文章，這篇文章就是大段摘抄了《紐約時報》（New York Times）的一篇文章，有好幾處還直接引用了原文的直接引語。】 ????現在唯一的問題是，《赫郵》和它的新東家美國在線是否能負擔得起這次轉變。《赫郵》向許多新員工發放了高薪（其中許多員工是該報從《紐約時報》和BBC等大牌媒體挖來的）。不過《赫郵》仍然打算招聘一些經驗不足的年輕記者，靠他們來產生盡可能多的內容，以幫助《赫郵》達到成功所需的規模效應。 ????要達到這個目標，《赫郵》可能還免不了要炮制大量的名人八卦。不過這就是21世紀的報紙。 ????譯者：樸成奎 |
????The Huffington Post, which built its business largely by aggregating and summarizing news stories reported and written by others, on Monday suspended a young technology writer for aggregating and summarizing a story written by someone else. Also on Monday, HuffPo unveiled its new HuffPost Celebrity and HuffPost Culture pages. ????Together, the two events highlight the changes the Huffington Post is undergoing: it's transitioning away from aggregation (cheap) and toward original reporting (expensive), which it is financing, in part, with fluff. ????That's just what newspapers used to do. Sadly, though, most newspapers, especially troubled regional papers, can't replicate the model because it only works at scale. Margins at HuffPo, now owned by AOL (AOL), are thin, as they are all over the Web, and the only way the site can make enough money to pay all its new reporters (cheap) and editors (expensive) is by selling ads against massive traffic volume. ????For all the criticism HuffPo and its founder Arianna Huffington take for being lightweight and shallow, the site seems to genuinely want to take on serious issues in a serious way (along with being lightweight and shallow elsewhere). As media consultant Clay Shirky pointed out last week in a widely circulated blog post, most people don't care very much about serious issues, so it's hard to draw the amount of traffic necessary to finance coverage of them if that's all you have. ????Shirky also noted how the newspaper business thrived for decades because it sold its products in a bundle. Most people were interested in sports, gossip, entertainment features, comics, classified ads, coupons and the like; relatively few were interested in what was supposedly the main product: news. The other stuff – the stuff people actually cared about – financed coverage of serious news, something that we need whether or not many people actually want to read it. The Web is unbundled by its nature (you can get classifieds at Craiglist, sports at ESPN.com, and celeb gossip at TMZ.com), forcing news, in most cases, to make it on its own. ????But Huffington Post is, in a way, putting the bundle back together for the Web. There is a reason the site calls itself "The Internet Newspaper." By churning out loads of lowbrow celebrity gossip and the like, HuffPo hopes to be able to draw the traffic necessary to finance more serious content. (HuffPo did not respond to an offer to comment for this article.) The serious stuff, in turn, helps give the site cachet. Newspapers wouldn't have done nearly so well if they contained no news. ????Of course, "serious" is in the eye of the beholder. HuffPo has been a major channel for spreading the proven-false idea that vaccines cause autism (a notion that, at this point, is tantamount to a lunatic conspiracy theory). A few years back it ran a semi-regular column by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (not coincidentally, one of the vaccine-autism mongers) and Brendan DeMelle called "Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Report," in which nearly every item was linked to a mainstream media report, somewhat undermining the premise. ????But just as HuffPo has been winding down its aggregation, it also has been slowly getting more serious in its coverage of hard news events. Its news, business and tech channels could be described as at least middlebrow, for example. At the same time, they are uneven, as the incident on Monday revealed. ????The post for which reporter Amy Lee was suspended consisted "a short but thorough paraphrasing/rewriting" of a post written by AdAge.com's Simon Dumenco, Dumenco himself complained. Lee didn't add anything or provide any analysis or anything other than a summary of someone else's work. ????Gawker's Ryan Tate observed on Tuesday that this isn't novel, and he provided a few examples of similar posts by other writers – some of them recent. What he didn't say was that such "overaggregation" is becoming more and more rare at HuffPo as it transitions into producing more original, staff-written content. He also didn't mention that HuffPo is far from alone in doing this. (On Monday for example, The Hollywood Reporter published a long summary/paraphrase of a New York Times article about Bruce Springsteen, complete with several quotes from the original story's sources.) ????The only question is whether HuffPo and its new corporate owner, AOL, can afford that transition. It's paying high salaries to many of its new hires (several of whom it poached from the likes of The New York Times and the BBC), but it tends to hire young, inexperienced writers who are expected to churn out as much content as possible to help achieve the massive scale HuffPo needs to succeed. ????It might take a lot of celebrity fluff to make that happen. Welcome to the newspaper of the 21st century. |
