The modish idea that social and political life is now driven by the "network" has been given an intriguing new twist by a couple of contemporary Levantines—Turkish Sufi cleric Fethullah Gülen and the Greek impresario Arianna Huffington (née Stassinopoulos), editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post (HuffPost) website. Gülen was last month crowned Prospect's top global public intellectual thanks to an online mobilisation of his followers. Huffington, meanwhile, is using her personal network not only to transform online publishing but also to redefine public intellectual life in a digital age.
Born in Athens in 1950, Huffington arrived at Cambridge University in the late 1960s as an awkward teenager and went on to use her large social circle to get herself elected president of the union in 1971. Two years later, she published an anti-feminist polemic, The Female Woman: An Argument against Women's Liberation for Female Emancipation, which was translated into 11 languages and branded her as the blonde, willowy anti-Germaine Greer publishing bombshell. Times columnist and fellow Face the Music panellist Bernard Levin refused to marry the then conservative Huffington in the late 1970s, a snub which led first to her move in 1980 to the US and then to her 1986 marriage to oil millionaire and then Republican congressman Michael Huffington. This very public union formally ended in 1997, and a year later Michael Huffington came out as bisexual.
Arianna emerged from the marriage with two daughters, a new name, a significant divorce settlement, a Washington DC network, a southern Californian address and a taste for the political spotlight. In 2003, Huffington, who by now had morphed from a Reaganite libertarian into a Prius-driving progressive, decided to run against the moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the recall election for California governor. (She was polling only 2 per cent when she dropped out a few months before the vote.)
When another southern Californian import, F Scott Fitzgerald, wrote that "there are no second acts in American lives," he hadn't imagined a woman like Arianna Huffington. After taking on the Terminator, her next act was even more audacious: turning her sights on American print media, she set about becoming a digital newspaper proprietor—a William Randolph Hearst of the self-publishing Web 2.0 age.
Almost everyone underestimated Huffington when, in May 2005, she again exploited her network of celebrity friends to launch the Huffington Post, a progressive news blog. Back then the blog form was seen by publishers as little more than an intellectual curiosity—a narcissistic conceit on which only geeks, political crazies and unpublishable writers wasted their time. There were, of course, a number of influential political bloggers—ex-New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, conservative muckraker Matt Drudge and libertarian Glenn Reynolds, for example—but traditional newspapers didn't see these one-man affairs as a threat; how could the self-published opinions of a nobody compete with the carefully edited thoughts of professional journalists?
But HuffPost has changed all that. As the Observer wrote recently when it named HuffPost the world's most influential blog, "the history of political blogging might usefully be divided into the periods pre and post-Huffington." With the site's hundreds of illustrious contributors, its 5.5m unique monthly viewers and 90m monthly page views, the $80m valuation on which it is raising its current round of financing and its $6-10m of annual revenue, derived largely from blue-chip advertisers like Starbucks, Volkswagen and the Discovery Channel, HuffPost is the most popular web-based newspaper. Nobody is underestimating Arianna any more.
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On her leftward journey over the last decade, Huffington might have passed Christopher Hitchens travelling in the other direction. Hitchens has argued in these pages that public intellectuals tend to be "self-starting independents" or editors of "minority-of-one type magazines." The ideal is a figure like George Orwell—a stoic "who does not attempt to soar on the thermals of public opinion." But Huffington has never been off those hotspots, instead hopping from one thermal to the next. What has remained constant is an uncanny mastery of modern media, a Zelig-like ability to remain at the centre of attention.
Indeed, rather than running against the current, Huffington's great achievement—from her public persona as a romantic British conservative to a Clinton-hating American neocon to a Bush-hating California liberal—has been to remain in the spotlight. Attention is her natural currency. Getting the attention of others is her genius. And what her success shows is that these days, when it comes to intellectual reputation, the ability to acquire attention and to maintain a strong personal network may be more important than a substantial body of ideas.
Arianna constantly reinvents herself, but believes completely in each reincarnation. And she is genuinely interested in ideas and bright people—a modern Madame de Staël. Her loyalty is to her conscience and to her network—and it is this that makes her such a significant figure.
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Just as Google has revolutionised information, YouTube has exploded the television business and Wikipedia has rewritten the encyclopedia, so the Huffington Post is changing the economics of public intellectual life. Huffington invented a simple but innovative model for squeezing value out of a network of branded intellectuals. She convinced her friends—names like Norman Mailer, Edward Kennedy, Richard Dawkins, Nancy Pelosi, Mia Farrow, John Cusack and Christopher Hitchens—to provide opinion for free. Once this content had been published on an easy-to-navigate website and links to other newspaper websites added, a frenzied virtuous cycle ensued in which audience created more audience and celebrities begat more celebrities, each feeding the other. Huffington's pulling power was shown earlier this year when, in the wake of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright scandal, Barack Obama posted an article on HuffPost about his Christian faith which got hundreds of thousands of readers and over 6,000 comments.
HuffPost is a hybrid of a traditional newspaper, a news blog and a curated news search engine. On its three-column front page, updated daily, the left-hand column is dedicated to "featured blog posts" from Huffington's hand-picked network of celebrities and experts, such as San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, communitarian theorist Amitai Etzioni and fellow Left, Right and Center host Robert Scheer. The middle column is a front door to newsworthy blog posts from HuffPost's various editorial sections on media, green issues, business and, of course, politics. The right-hand column links to lighter fare, including a humour section called "23/6," which satirises Huffington's enemies, including her bête noires Bill and Hilary Clinton. Last, but certainly not least, is the front page section "All Things Arianna," which includes "Arianna's TV Appearances," "Arianna In Print" and "Arianna's Speeches."
Internet businesses such as Google, YouTube and Facebook are defined by their ability to generate large quantities of free content and then to sell advertising from the traffic that follows. The potential of these business models explains the generous valuation of many Web 2.0 companies. HuffPost has raised $10m in two rounds of venture capital investment, and its $80m valuation is a healthy figure for a website with no in-house technology of any value. The technology site Techcrunch has suggested that HuffPost might try for a public flotation later this year off the back of the traffic boost it will receive as the presidential election approaches. If so, this would be a first: no blog has ever gone public before. The traditional media business model is the reverse of HuffPost's. Conventional publishers must pay not only writers, but editors, fact-checkers and other intermediaries. HuffPost, in contrast, rarely edits its contributors' work, and so its editorial staff is minuscule. The business needs just 50 staff to manage a website with millions of visitors a month.
No wonder the conventional newspaper business is in crisis. Lightly staffed websites like HuffPost are siphoning off both readers and advertising. Last year was the worst for American newspapers since 1950. Print-ad revenue fell by 9.4 per cent, while classified ads were down almost 17 per cent. And 2008 looks even worse, with estimates of ad revenue dropping by up to 15 per cent. My local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is reported to be losing $1m a week while the McClatchy Company, which owns regional papers like the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, recently cut 1,400 jobs. Almost all the big newspapers are experiencing steady declines in circulation.
Most newspapers have websites, but the cost of paying journalists and editors to produce content doesn't support the traditional news industry any more. As Jeff Zucker, president and CEO of NBC Universal, said last year, the dollar revenues of traditional media are trickling into pennies of online advertising revenue. It is significantly cheaper to advertise online—which is fine for a site like HuffPost with its tiny staff, but catastrophic for newspapers like the New York Times or Los Angeles Times with their huge overheads. Take the Washington Post, which, in spite of its 9m monthly unique visitors—making it the third most popular online US newspaper—is still struggling to make an online profit. The problem is that despite having cut over 200 news staff in the last decade, the Post still employs 700 people in its newsroom. Compare that to HuffPost's achievements, with 50 full-time staff, and the future looks bleak for the labour-intensive newspaper.
True, Huffington has signed a small team of experienced managers and journalists—such as Betsy Morgan, formerly cbsnews.com's general manager, and the Washington Post's Thomas Edsall, the new political editor. It also employs a handful of paid reporters. But most of HuffPost's content is produced by unpaid contributors. So how does she do it? Why do HuffPost's authors write for nothing?
The answer gets us to the cultural heart of the Web 2.0 revolution. In the December 1997 issue of Wired, Silicon Valley futurist Michael H Goldhaber wrote an influential essay entitled "Attention Shoppers," which suggested that the great scarcity in the 21st-century digital media economy will be attention. Where information is effectively infinite, intelligent people will be involved in a Darwinian struggle to be heard above the digital cacophony.
The pioneering entrepreneur of this world is Arianna Huffington. HuffPost is an early example of an attention-economy company in which writers give away their content for free in order to be noticed by others. Huffington's genius is to have understood this shift in the value of content and to have crowned herself queen of the attention economy before most of us even knew of its existence.
Rather than narcissism, the attention economy is really all about sales. Celebrities write for free on Huffington's site to advertise themselves, to raise awareness of their personal identities, to sell their speaking services, to get book deals, to hawk their new movie or to show off their technology start-up. The more interesting their opinion, the more eyeballs they get and the more value they add to their personal brand. It's what Silicon Valley people call the "razor-blade model"—giving away the razor for free and then making money from sales of the blades. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and one of Silicon Valley's most far-sighted thinkers, is writing a book about this economy called, predictably enough, Free.
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So it seems everyone wins in the HuffPost economy. Consumers are spoilt with interesting free opinion from a glittering array of writers. Smart new media entrepreneurs like Huffington get to take their companies public. Contributors get vast audiences for their writing. What's not to like?
The problem is that the free information economy of HuffPost is actually very costly when it comes to reliable knowledge about the world. As professional journalists are replaced by opinionated celebrities competing for recognition in the attention economy, how will an Arianna Huffington, blogging from her home in Brentwood, LA, know what's happening in Tehran or Washington? As newspapers shut down their foreign desks—something that is already happening—how will we Huffington readers know whether to trust the accuracy of her work?
At the moment, HuffPost works because the luminaries on Huffington's network have access to the reliable information derived from professional news journalists and commentators. But as the traditional newspaper business withers, media is liable to degenerate into a surreal Ponzi scheme of digital illusions and delusions where empirical facts will be replaced by opinion and professional news gatherers by commentators-with-attitude. This represents a real threat to representative democracy. In a society where nobody can reliably know what is going on, it is hard to act as a good citizen or to vote in good conscience on the performance of our politicians.
So how can we save journalism and keep democracy alive? HuffPost's solution is to go back to Huffington's compatriot Aristotle and his communitarian theories of citizenship. If the political community (the polis) is undermined by the crisis in news reporting, then we all have a responsibility, as citizens, to report the news ourselves. Journalism is transformed into a moral calling. And thus is born the seductive idea of the "citizen journalist"—the ethical man or woman of the new media age.
If the citizen journalist is made necessary by the decline of old journalism, he or she is made possible by digital technology. After all, we all now have access to affordable and easy-to-use publishing tools—the blogs, the cameras and the camcorders linked up to always-on mobile and internet networks. In theory, anyone with a web connection can now be a journalist and save democracy.
To test the theory of citizen journalism, last year Huffington teamed up with Jay Rosen of New York University, the founder of an idealistic citizen journalism start-up called newassignment.net, to create OffTheBus, a HuffPost project designed to funnel the best citizen journalism coverage of the 2008 presidential election and publish it on HuffPost.
It sounded compelling in abstract. And while OffTheBus has certainly made an impact, it has also raised worrying questions about professionalism and integrity in journalism. Huffington and Rosen "hired" Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old failed novelist with no journalism training, to report on the Obama campaign. Having blundered into a Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco in April, Fowler reported in HuffPost on Obama's off-the-record remarks about "bitter" small-town Americans turning to guns and religion. The story got hundreds of thousands of readers, and the consequent public storm did serious damage to the Obama candidacy. A couple of months later, Fowler made the news again when she taped a profanity-laden tirade (off the record of course) from Bill Clinton against another reporter and then wrote about it on HuffPost.
While at first glance the influence these stories had might suggest OfftheBus was working, in reality it exposes the limits of the experiment. Fowler was less interested in reporting news than in making it herself. The violation of trust between reporter and politician involved in her reporting would make it impossible to sustain a responsible journalism in the long term.
So if the untrained citizen journalist can't save democracy, who can? Not HuffPost's celebrity bloggers, since they have no interest in tramping the streets researching original stories. Only trained reporters with proper editors can do this. And they are being laid off by increasingly unprofitable US newspapers which can't compete with HuffPost.
It's not clear how the beleaguered American media might see its way out of this predicament. So what about the situation in Britain? While media here are exposed to the same threats as their American counterparts—it is presumably only a matter of time until we have some sort of British HuffPost—and are also experiencing declines in circulation and advertising revenues, albeit less acutely, they might at least look forward to a softer landing, thanks to the greater variety of funding models in place. The Guardian, for example, which has pioneered the most innovative consumer news website on either side of the Atlantic and which has just acquired the paidcontent.org technology blog for around $25m, is owned by the non-profit Scott Trust, which is committed to protecting the editorial integrity of newspapers. The publicly-funded BBC, with its licensing model and innovative in-house internet products like the iPlayer, is another example of high-quality news media which hasn't been undermined by free online content. Certainly, neither the Guardian nor the BBC are quite as vulnerable to the free market as US papers like the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times.
So just as British new media entrepreneurs can learn from HuffPost, so perhaps Huffington can learn something from the British model. Maybe her next act should be to convince Americans that professional journalism is as much a civic good as good universities or safe streets. If nothing else, this might convince the editors of Prospect to include Arianna Huffington in their list of top 100 public intellectuals the next time they run their poll.
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