The Crimson White, over the next year, will make several transitions to further incorporate new media into its publication. New media incorporates a wide range of Internet innovations such as blogging, commenting, website hit counting, video content and other multimedia to create a medium better suited to each individual reader. CW Staff Reporter Charles Scarborough interviewed Huffington Post’s Senior Features Editor, Katherine Thomson, in order to get the perspective of an industry-leading and highly innovative organization.
Charles Scarborough: What is The Huffington Post’s place in the current state of New Media?
Katherine Thomson: The beauty of the Internet is that there is room for everyone because newspapers are the only kind of news that people have to pay for. If you watch television it’s free. With radio, it’s the same way.
Just because I go to The Huffington Post website doesn’t mean I’m not going to go to The New York Times website, or not go to the Drudge Report. If you’re getting on the subway in the morning, you’re going to pick up a newspaper to buy. But with the Internet, the more the merrier—it’s not like you visit one website or the other. It is different in that way. The economics are different.
CS: What emphasis on news values does the Huffington Post have relative to those of conventional newspapers?
KT: It’s very timely. We have stories posted in the morning that wouldn’t be printed in a newspaper until the next day. So, in a way, you’re getting tomorrow’s news today.
But we have reporters who have the same standards as reporters from newspapers. We have a White House reporter who goes to the White House. He talks to sources and gets edited. It is no different than a newspaper, but we are faster. We are a lot more nimble, because it is constantly changing and can constantly be updated. News can be posted instantly or near instantly.
It gets really easy feedback, because you can tell really quickly if people are responding to a story by seeing how many hits a story is getting. It is much more influenced in real time by what the reader wants. It’s more supply and demand in that way. If we see a reader is responding to a certain story, we can have more of those type stories. It’s easier story-by-story to see what people respond to and don’t respond to, so we can give them more of that content.
CS: Does the Huffington Post’s juxtaposition of blogs and news reports create a clear distinction to give credibility to the reports as objective or does the shared space debase the perceived objectivity of the news stories?
KT: I think everyone gets their news with some form of opinion. The New York Post is really opinionated, British papers are very opinionated, cable news is opinionated. I think the readers are smart enough to tell the difference between a total opinion piece and a facts piece. I don’t think it debases it at all. I think it just adds to the conversation. It’s about the facts.
CS: What is The Huffington Post and other Internet media’s strongest asset?
KT: It’s nice to have multimedia integration. A newspaper is great, but would you rather just read a story or would you rather read a story, look at 10 big color photos and maybe watch a video all at the same time in one place? The Internet is great, not just The Huffington Post, because you can have all kinds of stuff like that, and it is not a dead end. In a newspaper, you read a story, and then it’s over—so what do you do? You end up going online anyway. So it’s nice because you can keep digging deeper and deeper if you want to, or you can click on to the next story.
CS: With the success of the Huffington Post, are you surprised more people haven’t created that type of online newspaper?
KT: The Huffington Post is lucky because it doesn’t have a newspaper its beholden to. We have no print legacy, no precedent. A lot of newspapers are just silly because they will put the same article online and they won’t add more photos. They won’t make it any more web-friendly, they’ll just put what was in the print version online. They don’t do anything to it.
Web is never valued as best in places that have print. I don’t really understand that, I think it is backwards. When Conde Nast cuts back, they cut back web, not print. I will never understand that.
