There is no doubt that news these days does literally travel at almost the speed of light. What was once breaking news can be fish and chip wrap within minutes of hitting the web. Some news sites are better than others at getting out ahead of that ever shortening curve and this is what a startup by the name of News Whip wanted to find out – who is the best news site at being viral.

The Irish startup says it tracks about 60,000 freshly published news stories each and every day from approximately 5,000 different sources; which it used in the form of its November data to find out which sources were producing the most viral content.

To figure out what qualifies as being viral News Whip uses the per hour number of  tweets on Twitter or  Facebook shares with that magical number being 150 for each service.

Using this number as the qualifier News Whip came up with this list of the top producers of viral news content. Here is the top 10 of those sites:

1. Huffington Post

2. BBC

3. Guardian

4. Dailymail

5. Mashable

6. ABCNews

7. Techcrunch

8. Foxnews

9. ESPN

10. Engadget

Now News Whip did have two qualifiers when it came to  creating the list. One, they don’t go behind paywalls to monitor paid sites which explains the lack of any appearances from sites like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

The second is that News Whip looks at the aggregated data – “this is who’s most successful in quantity, not quality“.

I guess that explains exactly why “some” news sites made the list over others.

via The Next Web (who placed 24th on the list – congrats)

The who’s who of the most viral news sites is a post from: The Inquisitr

Ariana Huffington’s major cash out on the Huffington Post hasn’t been without incident, and the noisy group of unpaid sweatshop writers who provided much of the site’s multi-million dollar content haven’t shut up- they’ve filed a class action lawsuit.

The suit is headed by writer and union organizer Jonathan Tasini, himself an unpaid HuffPo contributor up until three days after the Aol buyout was announced. Tasini has tangled with media giants before, winning a settlement against the New York Times over the fate of freelancer content.

I posted a few weeks back about the ethical spot Huffington herself is in with the allegations- she often spouts off on TV, rightfully and righteously, about corporate exploitation of the middle and working class while herself gaining massive wealth off the unpaid contributions of writers. To argue no one is forced to spend hours researching and writing a HuffPo post is to lend credence to the idea no one is forced to work excessive hours in dangerous conditions with no paid time off or health coverage, wouldn’t you say?

Huffington recently penned the book Third World America, and in a lengthy screed, described the impetus behind the book:

It was the way that Washington rushed to the rescue of Wall Street but forgot about Main Street. It was the daily drumbeat of depressing statistics: One in five Americans unemployed or underemployed. One in nine families unable to make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans on food stamps.

Upward mobility has always been at the center of the American Dream — a promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll do well, and your children will have the chance to do even better.

Well, that promise has been broken, and America’s middle class is under assault. The American Dream is becoming a nightmare.

What became clear while writing the book is that the decline of the middle class was no accident. Middle-class America didn’t suddenly lose its mojo. It was the result of tricks and traps. Tricks in the ways we financed our homes. Traps in the ways credit-card companies used hidden fees and fine print and skyrocketing interest rates to get their hands on our money, driving more and more people into debt.

The suit will definitely interest anyone who makes their living writing for the web, and could stand to change conditions for exploited freelancers in this fairly horrific job market. What do you think about the move to sue Huffington and her blog? Do you think the court will side with the writers or the media empire?

HuffPo, Aol, Arianna hit with lawsuit by unpaid bloggers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Off the bat, I will admit to having an intense girl-crush on Arianna Huffington.

I’ve been an ardent fan of both Politically Incorrect and Real Time with Bill Maher for a decade and a half, and I find Huffington’s passionate pleas on behalf of the exploited middle and working class during her frequent appearances to be moving, convincing and compelling. Admittedly, I haven’t read two of her books dealing with the issue, “Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America” and “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream,” but both have been on my “want to read” list for quite a while.

And when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert responded to internet demand for an anti-Tea Party (and thus, really, anti-corporatist) rally on the National Mall last fall, Arianna was there to bus my whole city to the protests on the HuffPo’s dime. I wanted to cover her sweet, aging-resistant face with kisses.

So why is she so hell-bent on not paying writers?

Despite Huffington’s massive financial coup in selling her well-trafficked namesake property to AOL a month ago, HuffPo has a minor image problem on the internet. The site has been lambasted time and time again for a few large issues with which it is associated- one being low-quality content based on search trends, and one being reposting something that is already posted elsewhere (Stewart poked fun at this facet just after the rally buses were announced on his show, and Colbert has even created the “Colbuffington Repost” to repost the reposting.)

Perhaps the most frequently recurring bad press Huffington and the HuffPo is subject to, however, surrounds treatment of the very people who supply the content that enabled such a big cash infusion in February. The site’s big name writers- celebrities, politicians and their ilk- are not the ones driving traffic to the site in numbers enough to support it. It’s an army of unpaid freelancers who better know which topics are currently driving traffic right now- writers the vocally anti-exploitation Huffington laughs at when confronted with the idea that perhaps they should be compensated for the work they put in to power her very-successful blog empire.

When asked late last week at a conference about HuffPo contributors calling for a strike, Huffington pooh-poohed the idea that writers should be paid, and likened the free labor to a high profile television appearance:

She argued that blogging on the Huffington Post is equivalent to going on Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart or the “Today” show to promote their ideas.

And, she said, there are plenty of people willing to take their place if they do.

“The idea of going on strike when no one really notices,” Huffington said. “Go ahead, go on strike.”

The issue is sticky, to be sure, and many hobbyist writers are happy to do decent quality work in exchange for exposure (quick: name a HuffPo writer than isn’t Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman or Russell Simmons.) And I speak from a point of great bias- as you know, I am a full-time blogger myself. To say I frequently reflect upon how lucky I was to receive my first real writing gig from an editor that not only treats me more fairly and compensates me more proportionately than any on-site employer I have had in my nearly 32 years of life is an understatement, and being able to afford to do what I do is a luxury I never take for granted. The fact of the matter remains, though, that if writers are not compensated for their efforts, no one could possibly afford to be a singularly-focused, dedicated writer for the web- a circumstance Huffington seems fine with perpetuating and even helping to establish as a new media model of revenue.

It’s not just Huffington’s writers that suffer from her notion that the amount of time spent culling, researching, editing and adding images to content is not worth any sort of compensation whatsoever- writers everywhere who must turn to the web in increasing numbers to supplement plummeting interest and employment opportunities in old media and print are similarly harmed. To devalue this emerging profession at this critical time is not just harmful to the writers currently locked into being compensated unfairly or just not at all in this horrific job market, it’s setting the stage for grossly under-compensating the people who will provide content for the web in the future-and ensuring that people who wish to pursue this sort of work will never be able to do so as a full-time job.

Given Huffington’s repeated dismissal of the idea she pay her writers even a pittance, it’s unlikely she will revise this stance in the near future. Which is a shame, because it really does serve to undermine her many valid points about the poor treatment of regular working schmucks in this country, and the wealthy people determined to profit off their hard work guiltlessly while pocketing massive profits.

HuffPo writers strike- why Arianna Huffington’s wildly successful media empire is harmful to web workers is a post from: The Inquisitr

I was asked today on Formspring “What are your thoughts on AOL buying Huffington Post?”. The response is informal 1st person, but I thought I’d share it here.

It’s an interesting buy on a couple of fronts.

People are far too quick to criticize AOL’s content strategy based on AOL’s disastrous (at times) past, but there is a future in new media content, and even before the latest wave of acquisitions, AOL has done a good (perhaps not brilliant) job with the old Weblogs Inc properties. I get what they are trying to achieve.

The Huffington Post is a risky acquisition though for a company that has mostly relied on in-house growth, and it’s perhaps not an easy fit into their business vs say TechCrunch slotting in to the existing network of blogs/ new media sites AOL own.

I have a pile of respect for Arianna Huffington and what she’s done with The HuffPost, but likewise the decision to place her in charge of AOL’s content properties is an interesting decision.

Arianna’s strength is that she places people around her who know the business better, and perhaps she’ll do this at AOL, but likewise while she was ideal in getting the attention/ celebrity involvement etc at Huffpost, I don’t think she fully has a grasp of the true blogging style sites that AOL owns because they are very different to what the Huffpost does.

In a broader market sense, the acquisition is a huge positive for the new media industry. We’ve seen plenty of smaller acquisitions over time, with the market starting to recover post GFC with more and more acquisitions. I don’t recall any acquisition in this space as large as the HuffPost deal, and the size of the deal reflects the maturity of the marketplace as a serious part of the media landscape. I’m not suggesting that the deal has made new media come of age (I believe this occurred several years ago) but it might go some way in blunting some of the small clique of critics (all in old media) who continue to take shots at the sector.

Thoughts On The AOL Huffington Post Deal is a post from: The Inquisitr

AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post for $315 million has delivered a smorgasbord of commentary this week, and who better to join the fray than our favorite Taiwanese animators.

Highlights: we’ll where do you start. Arianna gets finger waved by Hot Air, Tim Armstrong is in a leaky boat labeled TechCrunch, and Bebo is portrayed as a monkey.

Enjoy:

AOL Huffington Post Acquisition Gets The Taiwanese Animation Treatment is a post from: The Inquisitr

As we reported earlier, AOL has acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million, the largest buy for a stand alone new media property that we can recall, let alone a new media network.

The size of the buy may be unprecedented in the history of new media, but there’s another interesting story to be told and one that might rock the tech blogosphere: TechCrunch was completely cut off from the deal, to the point that they weren’t even given the story under embargo.

The post announcing the news on TechCrunch hit the site at 9:24pm PST, some 23 minutes after the news was broken by (we think) the tech blogosphere’s best journalist Kara Swisher. But it’s more than that: Kara didn’t just break the story, she posted it complete with a video interview with Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong that had been pre-recorded prior to the announcement, indicating clearly that the Wall Street Journal publication had been given the exclusive over TechCrunch.

But it gets better, because not only was TechCrunch not given the information before the embargo, they weren’t afterward either. At the time of writing, TechCrunch quotes the press release of the deal, and appear to have been completely cut off from anyone in AOL, despite TechCrunch being owned by AOL.

We can only speculate at this time on the why, but with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington picking fights with other AOL properties, in particular Engadget, we can only suggest that perhaps Arrington has fallen out of favor among the AOL hierarchy, or even that he was purposely excluded in an attempt to force him out of the company.

Either way, TechCrunch, a site that has always prided itself on exclusives and breaking news, has now, with this deal, fallen on poorer times.

We’re betting that with Arianna Huffington as his boss, Michael Arrington won’t last the year working for AOL.

Disclosure, in a past life I wrote for TechCrunch

The Ultimate Snub: AOL Buys The Huffington Post and Doesn’t Tell TechCrunch is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wow. Holy Crap.

This has to be some of the biggest deal to hit the blogosphere, over shadowing AOL’s purchase of TechCrunch for a rumored amount of $10 million.

Following the Super Bowl Kara Swisher from All Things D got the scoop of a lifetime as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Arriana Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post, announced that AOL has purchased Huffington Post for the sum of $350 million.

Here is the video of Kara interviewing Armstrong and Huffington about the announcement.

By the way – this means that Arriana Huffington is Michael Arrington’s boss. I’m sure this is going to go over well.

Holy Crap! $315 Million later and AOL buys Huffington Post [VIDEO] is a post from: The Inquisitr

While fans of The Daily Show may have been surprised at Arianna Huffington’s seemingly on the spot offer to bus any New Yorkers who required a lift to Jon Stewart’s “Rally To Restore Sanity” or Stephen Colbert’s “March To Keep Fear Alive,” the announcement came as a shock to Huffington’s “people,” as well.

Huffington explained how the idea, estimated to cost around $250K so far, came to pass as she prepped for her TDS appearance:

“Jon and I were talking in the green room about the rally. I said, ‘Oh my God, how are those people going to get there?’ On the air I decided to make that offer, it was spontaneous, and nobody knew. My people were in the green room with me, and even they had no clue.”

The night after the announcement, Stewart poked fun at the Huffington Post’s reporting style when recounting the segment:

“Oh my God, Arianna just Oprah’ed the buses!” Stewart said the following night. “By the way, I hope that her announcement was real and not some Huffington Post thing where it’s not like actual transportation, it’s just embedding a link to Greyhound. Like, I hope they’re not just being bus aggregators in this situation.”

HuffPo president Greg Coleman conceded that the price tag for the rally buses would be quite high for the tens of thousands of riders who have RSVPed, but he says that the company is reaching out to “marketers” and that they see the event as an “opportunity.”

[TheWrap via Gawker]

Cost of HuffPo ‘Sanity’ buses? $250K so far is a post from: The Inquisitr

PubMatic benefits online publishers through:

-Increased Revenue: more revenue from ad networks and ad exchanges through the use of PubMatic’s Ad Price Prediction technology
- Brand Protection: managing channel conflict between The Huffington Post’s growing sales force and ad networks, and providing tools to manage advertiser blocklists, creative policies and immediately eliminate unwanted creative
- Management and Efficiency: streamlining ad operations processes with support for managing ad network relationships and an integrated reporting dashboard
”PubMatic is excited to bring our platform for publisher monetization to a leading online news brand such as The Huffington Post. Our strong track record of delivering improved monetization and management capabilities for the Internet’s top properties shows how we’ve been pioneers and innovators in optimizing ad revenue for premium online publishers,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PubMatic.

“The Huffington Post looks forward to tapping PubMatic to help monetize its large audience,” said Eric Ashman, Chief Financial Officer of The Huffington Post. “PubMatic will help HuffPost use technology to automate and optimize our non-guaranteed inventory. This will help us strengthen our position in direct channel sales and deliver more comprehensive packages to advertisers.”
According to Nielsen Online, The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing news sites and it is continuing to expand in other mediums such as mobile. PubMatic’s technology will enable The Huffington Post to expand its revenue optimization.

PubMatic Selected To Optimize Ad Revenue By The Huffington Post is a post from: The Inquisitr

Kara Swisher has news today that Huffington Post is going to be collaborating with Facebook to launch a new feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News”. The idea is that readers will be able to create a personalized social networking type page within Huffington Post itself.

I would just like to note at this point that we posted about Facebook looking to become the HuffPost of your social media world yesterday in like of their purchase of Friendfeed. This was of course the result of a larger post by Chadwick Matlin at the Washington Post where he suggested the idea

Instead, I think this is about social aggregation. Facebook bought FriendFeed so it could become the Huffington Post of your social life.

So it is rather interesting to see this post by Kara that has Huffington Post being the one to start the process of melding news blog sites with social media networks.

“We are looking at HuffPost Social News like a ‘digital water cooler,’ because we see news going in that direction,” said Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder Arianna Huffington, in an interview with me this weekend. “We did this, because we are interested in real identities having real conversations about news.”

While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, this kind of innovative deployment on the Huffington Post is actually a very big step for the site, especially as an opportunity to bind its readers to it more closely, presumably increasing engagement and traffic.

“This is a natural way to expand into the Facebook community and give users who desire to engage and comment with friends more privacy,” said Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, with whom I also spoke earlier today. “And, like a lot of other sites, we are trying to make our site more attractive to marketers who want to engage with engaged users.”

Through the use of Facebook Connect and a Social News module that would appear on every page of HuffPost your activity on the news site would be sent back through to your Facebook timeline. It would also find your Facebook friends that are also reading HuffPost. Below is an example of Kara’s Facebook Module on Huffington Post

images courtesy of Kara Swisher

Huffington Post teams up with Facebook – talk about deja vu is a post from: The Inquisitr

Huffington Post’s investors have seemingly undertaken a small coup d’état, dumping CEO Betsy Morgan in favor of Eric Hippeau of Softbank Capital.

On the surface at least, the change in leadership would appear to be amicable, at least as much as these things can be. The press release heaps praise on Morgan, but makes no attempt to explain why she was “leaving the company” or where she was headed next, a sure sign that the push was unexpected.

On paper, new CEO Eric Hippeau would appear to be well qualified for the position. As well as having been on The Huffington Post’s board for several years, he is a former CEO of Ziff-Davis, the then publisher of ZDNet. Morgan was formerly with CBS, the current owner of ZDNet.

Hippeau’s has an interesting challenge going for with The Huffington Post. The company is well cashed up, but likewise having risen to the top in terms of traffic they must develop new projects to drive new growth, never an easy task when you’re already near the top of your game. The Huffington Post’s foray into investigative journalism offers some promise, but the more interesting project is its foray into local news, a sector notable for the number of failed startups that couldn’t turn local news into a viable business.

(Image via AllThingsD)

Huffington Post gets new CEO, spins departure of old one is a post from: The Inquisitr

The $1.75 million Huffington Post investigative journalism fund is under attack by a journalist signed up by the fund on the grounds that The Huffington Post couldn’t adequately edit her work.

Freelance Wall Street reporter Teri Buhl tells Business Insider the Huffington Post fund is having trouble “getting any content out” and that they “lied about having their site ready and a having a business editor to edit my work.” Buhl goes on to whine that the editors for the fund had no business editing experience, and that the head of the fund Nick Penniman doesn’t have print experience, hence “he has no idea what he’s doing to try and cover the econ crises.”

Business Insider claims it’s a rocky start for the fund, but that’s only true if you accept that the fund mistakenly hires snotty journalists who need their hands held and are incapable of functioning without the intense participation of an editor. As we know, that model is working great for newspapers in 2009.

The Huffington Post investigative journalism fund needs to add the following question on the application for writers: are you capable of looking after yourself? If not, please do not apply.

Journalist whines while Huffington Posts tries to help is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Huffington Post today announced that it has acquired a majority stake in the New York Times Company.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but is believed to have been facilitated with the help of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a major investor in the company. Slim will maintain a minority ownership stake, and under the deal obtained ownership of the physical assets of the group, including outright ownership of radio station WQXR-FM.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington said in a statement that the New York Times would cease print publication on Friday, after which it would become an internet only publication. A decision has not been made about the future of the New England Media Group, (which includes The Boston Globe) but it is believed that the group will be shut down, and the Boston.com web portal folded into a new Boston local site on HuffingtonPost.com. Successful blog come information portal About.com would be folded into a new service tentatively called “The Huffington Wiki.”

“This is an important milestone in the history on online journalism” said Huffington. “The New York Times has a long future ahead of it, and we look forward to the challenge of making this company great again, without the burden of newsprint.”

Final job cuts for the group have yet to be finalized, but Huffington assured any employee laid off that they would be welcomed warmly if they applied for unpaid blogging positions at either the NYTimes.com or HuffingtonPost.com sites.

The Huffington Post acquires the New York Times is a post from: The Inquisitr

This venture came about because Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief, is concerned that the massive layoffs being experienced in the newspaper industry is hurting investigative journalism at a time when it is needed most. Huffington also hopes that this move will encourage others to fund similar ventures.

The Huffington Post skews liberal, but its founder promised that the work done by the investigative fund would be nonpartisan. The group would be discredited quickly if it puts out faulty information, said Nick Penniman, the fund’s executive director.

"We care about democracy, not Democrats," he said.

Rosenstiel said the HuffPost is following another recent trend encouraging content to be reproduced virally for maximum exposure, instead of trying to direct people exclusively to the site.

The HuffPost also promises to give a higher profile to work produced by other reporting groups, such as The Center for Public Integrity and The Institute for Justice and Journalism.

Source: Huffington Post

I realize that there is probably going to be a lot of controversy over this just because it is the Huffington Post but it is an encouraging sign that we are at least trying to find new ways to keep journalism alive.

Huffington Post announces investigative journalism venture is a post from: The Inquisitr

An ad placed by the Huffpost at MediaBistro calls for editors as follows:

The Huffington Post is looking for web editors with expertise in the following areas: sports; technology and gadgets; and books.
Each editor will create and manage one of three new sections — Sports, Technology & Gadgets, and Books — being launched on The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) — “The Internet Newspaper.” Editors will develop “destination” pages by overseeing news and a subject-specific group blog.

The Huffington Post is already the webs largest blog (the term is used loosely), delivering 195 million page views a month according to Quantcast, and the site sits in 1st spot according to Technorati.

(via Fishbowl NY)

Huffington Post expanding into sport, tech and books is a post from: The Inquisitr

Unnamed media companies may start taking to court blogs and sites that quote extracts and links, according to a report by the New York Times.

The report specifically names The Huffington Post and The Business Insider (formerly Silicon Alley Insider) as being particularly guilty of the practice. What both sites do is run an extract of a post or article on another site, then link to that article at a certain point. The argument is that by printing only an extract of the original article, the method is legal under fair use doctrine. The problem being is that fair use under US law has never been really clear on how much content is acceptable.

Without wanting to extract too much (ironically, I picked the NY Times article up on an aggregator site), here’s some choice parts:

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “They think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

There’s wrong on one level though. What the Huffpost and AlleyInsider do isn’t scraping, it’s a manual selection of interesting content. Scraping is what a spam blog does when they pull the full content automatically.

The bigger question though is will this discontent result in further legal action to test what constitutes fair use in a court of law? The New York Times sadly settled with Gatehouse Media when the question was last raised.

Where we’ve done a similar post here we’ve always done so with permission of the author, on the basis that we wanted to be on the safe side, and I’ve said previously that I found it interesting that The Huffington Post was acting in this way without permission, given how many sites would beg them to be included. Lets hope someone sues so we can settle what’s acceptable once and for all.

Media companies may challenge extract linking is a post from: The Inquisitr

Barack Obama addressed the nation this evening, before opening the doors to questions from the assembled media.

Question number two came from Sam Stein from the Huffington Post.

Stein asked about torture policy going forward and is anyone above the law? Obama said the United States would not torture and “no one above the law” and can be prosecuted — but “generally speaking” he is “interested in looking forward, not backward.”

Stein came back for seconds according to the Huffington Post, asking the President shortly after whether he would overturn the military policy of not allowing media to cover caskets of soldiers coming home from war zones.

A big day for blogging and the Huffington Post. Congrats to Stein and the team.

The Moderate Voice has more on the event here.

Mark this day: President now takes press conference questions from bloggers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Under the deal, 23/6 will be folded into a new dedicated comedy section on the Huffington Post, although reports aren’t clear whether it would keep any part of its current name and branding. Features including Dickipedia will be remaining in place. 

Jossip has the full memo here.

Rumors had been circulating that the not greatly successful 23/6 would fold as part of a shakeup at IAC. Traffic to the site is primarily from The Huffington Post itself, and notably has dropped off post election in line with a traffic drop at the Huffington Post.

Huffington Post Acquires 23/6, will fold into Comedy Section is a post from: The Inquisitr

For most of this year, possibly longer, The Huffington Post has been syndicating articles on their site with links back to the original source. The general idea is to take 2-3 paragraphs from the original source, then link out at the end so that readers can continue reading the article on the original site.

I’ve always found the model interesting, but I also presumed that it was done with permission; we now run a small about of content here at The Inquisitr on the similar basis, although always with permission from authors upfront.

It turns out that The Huffington Post not only didn’t have permission, but at times were republishing full posts, not just extracts.

Chicagoland made the initial call out on content being stolen, then followed up with a pile of extra examples. Ryan Tate at Gawker calls the practice grubby.

Wired got comment from The Huffington Post, saying the examples of full content being used were an error, and that the syndication posts help promote sites and deliver traffic to the source. They also noted that the headlines also link to the source, at that 95% of the time readers never hit the extract page, instead going straight to the source.

It’s a double dose of copyright gray not well considered.

Running 2-3 paragraphs of a longer post with a link back may constitute fair use, but not adding to the content and running it whole (even if only part of the post) starts to get fishy on the fair use part, when considering that fair use in this context would normally be considered when quoting in the context of unique content.

I’m not about to widely condemn The Huffington Post for the practice, poorly played out as might have been the case, but it does very much surprise me that they didn’t attempt to obtain permission up front for printing the extracts; likewise I’m sure that it wouldn’t be hard for them to find willing partners who would welcome their content on The Huffington Post in this way, given the staggering amounts of traffic the site pumps through, where even a small cut of links could instantly deliver tens of thousands of page views each time a site gets linked to.

For others it is a lesson learned: when in doubt, ask for permission. We did.

Huffington Post’s Syndication tricks come back to bite them is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Huffington Post has signed a deal with the yet to launch news provider GlobalPost for world news syndication.

GlobalPost is due to launch January 12 (2009) and is offering competition to AP on world news through a network of international reporters billed as the largest from a US news organization outside of AP itself. GlobalPost is competing is an increasing competitive syndication market alongside new comers Daylife and CNN Wire against the increasingly unpopular due to costs AP and to a lesser extent Reuters.

The Huffington Post closed a $25 million round of funding last month and was said at the time to be using the money to expand local coverage and investigaitve journalism. The Huffpost has already started syndicating some world content under their new World News section, and it would appear that part of their new strategy of broadening their appeal base outside of politics includes global news.

Huffington Post inks deal with GlobalPost for world news coverage is a post from: The Inquisitr