Business & Tech

Huffington Says Net Changes Way People Relate to News

New AOL BFF, at CSUN lecture, says opportunities lie ahead. Also, get more sleep.

Arianna Huffington, the first to lecture at CSUN's new Valley Performing Arts Center Saturday night, said her father had a passion for newspapers, starting several which went bankrupt. One thing is certain— Huffington is not like her father.

She, on the other hand, has become the queen of new media, her coronation occurring earlier this month—announcement of the of her Huffington Post to AOL for an estimated $315 million.

Already renown for political punditry and power brokering, Huffington will supervise editorial content for the Post as well as AOL's other online properties, including nearly 800 hyperlocal Patch.com Web sites.

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The timing of the sale just a week before her  lecture was coincidence, but the deal figured prominently into comments she made during her speech and afterward, when she answered questions collected from the audience before the program started. In response to one query, she said AOL's ownership of the Huffington Post won't alter its direction but will hasten changes.

"We are going in the same direction, but getting off a passenger train and getting on a supersonic jet," she said.

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Social media, such as Facebook, and Web sites for news and opinion have fundamentally changed the way people get and react to news, she said. "People don't just passively consume news. They share news."

At the same time, the Huffington Post and other sites offer people a way to express themselves, contribute to the discussion of ideas and issues and "become part of their times."

Huffington said there is a huge need for fact-checking on the Internet, and she hopes for new tools that quickly sort truth from fiction. Online news sites are less likely to be prisoners of a traditional media mentality that declares that truth invariably lies at the midpoint of conflicting opinions.

"That's not true of global warming," she said. "The truth is sometimes on one side or the other."

Traditional media also is guilty of treating every issue as a debate between the political left and the political right. At times, though, there are differences among those with the same general political orientation. For example, she said, liberals are not the only ones skeptical about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. So, too, are conservatives such as George Will and Pat Buchanan.

Huffington praised the business model for the Post and AOL  properties, including Politics Daily, FanHouse, PopEater, TechCrunch, MapQuest and Moviefone. All of these sites rely on revenue from advertising and do not charge visitors for content.

Pay walls are not going to work, she asserted. The only people willing to pay are those seeking "specialized financial information or weird porn. I don't know why and I'm not saying it's the same people."

Huffington has been criticized for not paying the Post's numerous bloggers while her site profits from their writing. She said that, unlike paid editors at the Post who work full-time, bloggers are not required to write at any time.

"You can blog whenever you want and if you don't blog for months, no one's going to bother you," she said.

She characterized blogging as an activity that provides fun, fulfillment and self-expression and compared the HuffPo's bloggers with volunteer researchers for Wikipedia.

She said recent conversations with Patch executives may lead to more blogging on Patch sites and the sharing of some blogs with the Huffington Post, giving writers much wider exposure.

The Internet makes it possible for people to create and work at jobs that coincide with their interests and it lets people engage in activities with others that add value to their lives and improve their communities.

But people also need to unplug themselves from laptops and smart phones and not skimp on sleep.

"Never charge devices next to where you sleep," she warned. Those who wake up at night and check for messages invariably fail to attain the quality of sleep they had initially, she said.


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