A very useful point from Conor Clarke about the contention that the Huffington Post is damaging an institution like The New York Times by being parasitic on its work. As Clarke points out, it appears to be that there’s a rising tide of “reading stuff on the internet” that’s lifting both boats:
My guess is that this point applies a fortiori to more “nromal” blogs (like, say, this one). Far from being “parasitic” on heavily linked-to news sites, these are complementary endeavors, driving readers to the sites that the bloggers use as their main sources of information. And of course America’s best newspapers are already hugely successful websites—thanks to the Internet, far more people read The New York Times today than at any previous point. The problem for everyone trying to make money on the internet—and that goes for everyone from the NYT to Josh Marshall to Arianna Huffington to whoever decided to hire Ezra Klein—is that ad rates on the web just don’t bring in very much money. In England, two of the best sources of information, the BBC and the Guardian, are already run as non-commercial enterprises and I have a feeling that more and more of the serious newsmedia will come in that form in the future.
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