Nikki Finke pronounces the Huffington Post, less than a day old, a collosal failure.
Arianna’s Blog Blows (LA Weekly)
Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too far. She has now made an online ass of herself. What her bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences.
One wonders by what yardstick Finke is measuring. THP has no SiteMeter or other public hit counter but I’d hazard a guess that it had tens of thousands of visitors on its first day, more than most blogs ever get. They had write-ups in major papers, including WaPo. InstaPundit linked them.
Finke reports that many of the big names touted by Huffington’s self promotion for the site failed to emerge and that most of the usual suspect liberal financiers stayed away. Fair enough. Air America proved that a lot of hype and a few big names don’t guarantee success.
Still, while I remain dubious of the long term prospects of a 300-member group blog, Huffington should get more than a day to prove she can do it.
Related:
Update (1821): ‘Huffington Post’ Syndication May Start in Early June
NEW YORK Tribune Media Services will probably begin syndicating content within a month from The Huffington Post, the news site/group blog that launched today. “We expect to go to market with the daily package early in June,” said John Twohey, TMS vice president for editorial and operations, when reached this morning by E&P.
Twohey said author/TMS columnist Arianna Huffington — whose new site features about 300 celebrity bloggers from the worlds of politics and entertainment — will travel to Chicago tomorrow to confer with the syndicate about the upcoming package. Over the next few weeks, Twohey added, “we want to establish ways of working with Arianna’s editors to capture content every day.”
The syndicated version of The Huffington Post will be a “best-of” selection of small and larger items from the site.
Not a bad start, if true.
