I Want Media’s “Future Of Media” Panel Taught Us A Bit About Startarounds, Content Farming, And “Weird Porn”
Yesterday afternoon, I Want Media hosted its annual “The Future of Media” panel as part of Internet Week New York. Panel guests included Dan Abrams, NBC News chief legal analyst and Mediaite founder; Josh Cohen, Google News senior business product manager; David Eun, Aol Media president; Jonathan Geller, the founder and editor of Boy Genius Report; Arianna Huffington, co-founder & editor in chief of The Huffington Post; Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour; and James Pitaro, Yahoo Media VP. The discussion was moderated by Patrick Phillips, founder and editor of I Want Media founder and adjunct professor at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, who, we’re pleased to report, did not launch any softball questions at the panelists.
On the topic of ventures like Aol’s Seed, for example, which uses content from writers who bid to take on story topics determined by algorithms, Phillips asked Aol (which referred to itself as a company in “startaround” mode — that is, a multi-billion dollar, established company “starting up” new ventures as it turns its image around) and Yahoo what, if anything makes these different from “content farms” — sites that pitch out content on a variety of topics for, quite often, very little or no pay to writers with dubious credentials or expertise. The difference, according to Eun and Pitaro, was the quality of the content their respective companies produce. The tension in the room raised further, however, after Phillips followed his question with another: Will you provide your writers with enough money to live on?
Phillips then asked Yahoo’s Pitaro whether there was any truth to recent rumors, reported by TechCrunch, that the company was looking into buying The Huffington Post. Pitaro responded by saying that Yahoo doesn’t comment on rumors, although Huffington herself chimed in, saying the site she helped found was interested in pursuing a “deep partnership” with Yahoo to produce original content for their women-oriented Shine site.
Huffington and Abrams also touched upon the issue of many news and entertainment sites’ tendency to go after what they referred to as “lowest common denominator” stories, or headlines that might be of dubious quality or importance, but which garner lots of web traffic. Abrams said that, contrary to popular belief, these stories can often hurt a site in terms of its image and how it portrays itself to its regular readers. In fact, they agreed, harder news stories were often what fared best on their sites in terms of being shared and linked.
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