Huffington post owner strikes out at old media

Arianna Huffington is the founder of the Huffington Post, the news site with over 22 million unique visitors every month. She spoke out against traditional media companies (led by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp) and their inability to adapt to deal with the new way media are shared online. She does not believe Newscorp will take their content of Google and believes keeping news content open and accesible is the way forward

“So it’s time for traditional media companies to stop whining and face the fact that far too many of them, lulled by a lack of competition and years of pretax profits of 20 percent or more, put cash flow above journalism and badly misread the web when it arrived on the scene. The focus was on consolidation, cost-cutting, and pleasing Wall Street — not modernization and pleasing their readers.

They were asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station, let the ship sail — pick your metaphor — and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the Internet and new media represent. And now they want to call timeout, ask for a do-over, start changing the rules, lobby the government to bail them out, and attack the new media for being… well, new. And different. And transformational. Suddenly it’s all about thievery and parasites and intestines”. via Arianna Huffington: Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism.

Picture: Stock Exchange | Chess | fabibel

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