The New York Times’ executive editor Bill Keller, who only last week called Fox News viewers “the most cynical people on planet earth,” has set his sights on another target, the left-leaning Huffington Post.

In his most recent column in the New York Times magazine, Keller is particularly aggravated by aggregators and takes issue with Arianna Huffington’s successful website:

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so . . . aggregated.

Last month, when AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million, it was portrayed as a sign that AOL is moving into the business of creating stuff — what we used to call writing or reporting or journalism but we now call “content.” Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.

An argument can be made as to whether or not what the Huffington Post does qualifies as journalism, but the rapid rise of blogs and social media has redefined the meaning of the word.

Huffington didn’t take Keller’s attack lying down, and fired back with a rebuttal:

Perhaps unsettled by the fact that, when combined, The Huffington Post and AOL News have over 70 percent more unique visitors than the New York Times, and that HuffPost/AOL News’ combined page views in January 2011 were double the page views of the Times (1.5 billion vs. 750 million), New York Times executive editor Bill Keller decided to unleash an exceptionally misinformed attack on HuffPost in a column released today and slated for this weekend’s NYT Magazine.

After opening his piece by patting himself on the back so hard I’d be surprised if he didn’t crack a rib (it seems everyone — even Woody Allen and those folks on Twitter — thinks he’s super “powerful” and “influential”!), Keller turned to the putative subject of his column: “the ‘American Idol’-ization of news” and the evils of “aggregation.” Hearkening back to the glory years when Rupert Murdoch and his minions labeled sites that aggregate the news “parasites,” “content kleptomaniacs,” “vampires,” and “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet” (the news industry equivalent of “your mama wears army boots!” although, not quite as persuasive), Keller says of aggregation: “In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.”

He then describes HuffPost’s offerings as nothing more than “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications.”

I wonder what site he’s been looking at. Not ours, as even a casual look at HuffPost will show. Even before we merged with AOL, HuffPost had 148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism. As long ago as 2009, Frank Rich praised the work of our reporters in his column. Paul Krugman more recently singled out the work of our lead finance writer. Columbia Journalism Review has credited our work for advancing the public’s understanding of the national foreclosure crisis, and a pair of our Washington reporters recently received a major journalism prize. Matthew Yglesias, Felix Salmon, Catherine Rampell, are among the many others who have cited the work of our reporters. Did Keller not notice that?

And did he not notice that he lost one of his top business reporters, Peter Goodman, to The Huffington Post — despite his best efforts to keep him? Indeed, on the very day that Keller’s column began circulating, we published a piece Goodman edited, a 4,000-word investigation of a for-profit college by Goodman’s first hire, Chris Kirkham, a former Washington Post intern. Did he think he came over to aggregate adorable kitten videos? And was he too busy scanning all those lists of “most powerful people” he’s on to notice that he also lost one of his top editors, Tim O’Brien, to us?

Even so, if those were the only charges he’d leveled, I wouldn’t have bothered responding. As they say on those TV lawyer shows, “Asked and answered.”

Keller isn’t totally off the mark as HuffPo has a lot of fluff on the site, including a divorce section. The fact remains that Huffington built an amazingly successful website from scratch, and cashed in at a time when traditional newspapers like the times are struggling.

While the market cap of The New York Times at $1.39 billion dwarfs what AOL paid for HuffPo, the two companies are going in the opposite direction, as the Times has seen its share price drop by nearly 70% in the last three years while the value of the Huffington Post increased exponentially.

What Keller knows but isn’t willing to admit is that both Fox News and HuffPo have changed the face of journalism, and not in a good way for the future of The Times.  They have been more nimble and innovative where the Times has largely plodded along, weighed down by a dying newspaper business and unsure of how to profit from the web.

Keller’s attacks are nothing more than desperate attacks from a desperate man.

The clock is ticking, Bill.

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About the author

Don Irvine
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.

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6 Comments for New York Times’ Keller Declares War on HuffPo

Chris

I’m with Keller on this. I don’t think the liberals on HuffPo and the conservatives on Fox are more nimble. They are tapping into anger and affirming people’s beliefs. That’s not news. Brain candy is always more “nimble” than newsgathering and news reporting. Keller is not a desperate man. Keller’s a grown-up.

Curmudgeon

I must disagree. Keller is well aware that he is captain of a sinking ship. But what he fails to see is that as the liberal voices that he favors lose touch with reality, the “paper of record” status slips away with increasing rapidity.

Kelly

I’m not a big fan of “cute kittens” in my news or “how to have tantric sex,” but that means I don’t click on those links for news. To me, news is information about current events. Therefore, if I want to get information about what is happening in Japan or the latest fight in congress, I click on the links that tell me about those things, specifically. So what if the HuffPo is an aggregate site? Everyone who gives them content has also given them permission to post it, including the NYT. Google has an aggregate format. So does AOL. Gosh, bet someone would have to stay up for 48 straight hours if they swore they wouldn’t sleep until they counted all the aggregate news sites out there. As for the “unpaid bloggers” that people keep bringing up–what’s the point, here? I enjoy interacting with people from all over the world, sharing ideas and philosophies. These are people who are keeping engaged in the political discussions of the day and most of them are very well informed because of it. I can’t help thinking that Keller is angry at, pretty much, any online venue because people get their news now instead of having to wait until the morning.

The Major

I believe that if Keller wanted to get back that 70% of lost readers & then Triple it,,,& therefore Quadruple his ADVERTISING Revenue (afterall,it’s a business FOR profit),,,I would strongly turn the Gray Lady around & go after the new GOD of the PRO-Left directly,,,OBAMA & his Czars,,who are destroying this country. It is so obvious to anyone with 1/2 a brain. Tear him & the 1st Spender apart relentlessly,,,24/7,,expose
all of the plans for Social-izing & Islam-izing the USA by this POTUS.
I guarantee that his readership & revenue will at least TRIPLE.
Alas,,,,the PRO-Left are all GELDINGS,,,,NO BALLS,,,so it will not happen.

NOT RACIST,,,NOT VIOLENT,,,just NOT SILENT

Wildbird

heres hopping this idiot ends up selling pencils on times squarewhen the NEW YORK SLIMES finaly gose bankrupt becuase of poor curculations

BigMouth

the NY Times has 2 problems in my book
1 is that bill keller seems to have personal vendettas [assange]and that has totally slanted their reporting. its like he wants to dig up the most minor dirt and smear someone because he has a personal problem with them.
2 is that the NY Times can be very slanted on controversial items related to national security. on those stories, the Times sticks very close to the govt story line and leaves out a lot of info that would give the reader a greater understanding of the issues. it’s like the Times is either overly cautious of not making washington too angry or the govt has too much influence in dictating what the Times is reporting. in other words, the Times is just not doing a good enuf job, and readers have to seek elsewhere to get a more complete picture.