For its five-years-old birthday gift, in May 2010, the Huffington Post saw its consultation overtake old-well-established digital emanations of print media. Its monthly traffic reached 12.7 million uniques (that’s 12.7 million single individuals who visited the website) and  more than 50 million visits.

New editorial heroes?

Is it big? The same month, the Wall Street Journal got *only* 8.2 million uniques and the Washington Post 7.9 million. The online news leader remains the New York Times, with 18.9 million uniques. The burning question spreading across all editorial lips is, of course: for how long? If you look at the trends below, coming from two different statistical websites, they show how the gap is closing between HuffPo and NYT:

Huffington Post traffic in red (monthly uniques) Image: Comscore, Huffington Post

(c) Comscore

For all editorial actors playing in the digital world, in a perfect timing with the recent controversy about the quality of pure digital players (well, notably in France vis-à-vis Mediapart, the rise of HuffPo is a good news. Believe it or not, you still have people (even colleagues) who miss the good old days when they was no Internet and who believe nothing really serious ever takes place there. You can’t change the world with Facebook, can you?

Huffington Post is a pure player whose editorial model combines more or less everything we’ve discussed in this series. It started as a collective blog, gathering posts by Ms Huffington and her crew of young wannabes:

“A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its “Bloggers Index”, but includes: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Heather Robinson, Michael Moore, Jimmy Demers, Madonna, Alec Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saskia Sassen, Sheryl Sandberg, John Cusack, Larry David, Nora Ephron, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Anneli Rufus, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Albert Brooks, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Richard Patrick, Craig Newmark, Donna Karan, Kenneth Cole, Ryan J. Davis, Donatella Versace, Bill Maher, Cleo Paskal, B.D. Gallof, Lutfullah Kamran, M. K. Asante, Jr., Robert Wright, Larry Gelbart, Stephen Covey Wendy Diamond and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

I wouldn’t decline a synopsis or two by one of those.

The HuffPo is also a news aggregator, a political media, a participative space with comments and a state-of-the-art integration of social media. Amongst all the things you can share on the website, you also can rate articles via your Facebook account (and hence let your friends know what you think of what you’ve just read). This is smart, because you add your own personal value to the pleasure of sharing a resource.

Oh, and they have photo of boobs (you can rate them too on Facebook and let your friend… hum. Maybe don’t.) This is one of the major criticisms raised against the Huffington Post: they’re not serious. They’re not the New York Times. They write about anything. And their readers like it:

Only 250 like those hands (c) Huffington Post

It is true that Politics only amounts to a quarter of the website traffic and that HuffPost is about almost everything. And true too that they don’t earn money – yet.

« The Huffington Post booked about $15 million of revenue last year », says Henry Blodget on Business Insider.  « Sales boss Greg Coleman thinks the company can double revenue this year to $30 million and double it again next year, to $60 million.  And from there, as long as the site’s traffic keeps growing, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to $100+ million. (…) Now, $100+ million is not the $1 billion or so of revenue of the New York Times. But most of the $1 billion or so of the New York Times revenue is going away (its paper-based ads and subscriptions).  What will be left, eventually, when the NYT’s paper-based distribution finally collapses, are the online revenues.  And those, for now, are in the neighborhood of $150 million. »

Even if Mr Blodget pushes his luck a bit (a smart newspaper won’t quit paper, they will reduce its volume, methinks), the trend is there. Huffington Post is on its way to become one of the major online media.

What can we learn from this for a European institution?

Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves.

As exposed in Henry Blodget’s story, the Huffington Post is a typical case of a disruptive technology. Those technologies, which provoke disruption in a well-established order, don’t need to be better than existing ones (at least at the beginning). « Their advantage – the reason people begin to adopt them – is that they’re also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. » See, they’re not perfect but they work and they please. HuffPost might not be the online media every editorial brain dreams of (even if it’s already enough to fantasize about it IMHO) but people do visit and read because it fits their information needs and because it’s free.

As an European institution, we’ve checked the free part. We might well do our homework on the subversive aspect. Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves. Rather than aiming at the perfect, bulletproof communication strategy or rock solid website in 22 languages, we could try a different approach. This what we did on Facebook and it works.

In general, and Huffington Post is not the sole actor doing this, we should proceed more by trial and error. Implementing a functionality in a few languages or on a selection of pages, extending it or removing it according to its success amongst our visitors. Searching for the better, cheaper, more convenient rather than for the perfect way of proposing a feature every serious website has since 2003.

Guess what? People read what they want to

There is a truth which is not easy to hear: European institutions, when it comes to online editorial news and content, are on a niche market. We indulge ourselves in labeling our visitors as « EU experts », with all the possible declinations (journalists, lobbyists, universitarians), while crossing our fingers about catching some *real* citizens in our (inter-) net. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing bad being a niche market. This is very good marketing segmentation, usually a very profitable one. Some advertisers would happily pay some good money to reach our audience. Our visitors are smart people, international, intellectual…

But we are not in this for the money. We sweat over our stories, editorial concept and content strategies because we want to reach the citizen, my Latvian grandmother, you and, especially, your friends and family who don’t read this blog and have never visited a European Institution website.

There is nothing wrong being a niche – except, maybe, if your aim is to reach everyone. To become mainstream because you believe your editorial production reflects debates, actions and decisions that have an impact on almost everyone at a certain time. If that is your objective, then the remaining inside the niche (who says the Bubble?) will not help you.

« More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story »

What HuffPost teaches us: you can’t tell people what they want to read. They know it and they find it. True, HuffPo covers a lot of subjects, some being more mundane than others. But Ms Arianna Huffington’s pieces are far from being yellow journalism. The Huffington Post covers a wide-range of opinions, always in the American Liberal side. The important word being: « opinions. »

The rising media aggregates posts from other blogs, invites its readers to write and comment, and publishes content from its editorial team. What started as a political blog became the first pure player in five years, just by extending its editorial territory, keeping it free and multiplying its contributors. « More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story » wrote Wired in 2007.

Maybe the real way to reach more than 10 million people a month is to extend our editorial territory. To keep producing and publishing the unique content European Institutions have while multiplying external contributions, opinions, topics. Cooking receipts from all Member States? North psychology versus South therapies? Afghanistan war dispatches? Anything of a certain quality that would appeal to the readers. To apply the recipe explained by Ms Huffington herself:

“Everything is Miscellaneous, is about what happens to institutions, such as news media, when their content gets turned into a big, miscellaneous pile, that anybody can pick out of, and rearrange the pieces. So they lose control over their editorial function, the newspapers do. They lose control over their front page, which obviously is a huge part of their value.

So you look at the Huffington Post, which has a couple of dozen news sources. It presents its own front page. It has its own staff of I don’t know how many bloggers who are writing there. And it is a rearrangement of this miscellaneous pile of news in a way that makes sense to the progressive readers of this site.”

And I haven’t mentioned European boobs slideshow – yet.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age
Here’s What People Actually Want To Read
This is the Future of the News: The Arianna Huffington Interview

Catering to the elite

As I write these lines, I have my copy of the FT open on the comments section, there’s the latest European Voice somewhere in the drawer, not to mention The Economist on my bedside table, ready to lull me to sleep. To all those that warn about the threats that concentration of media ownership poses for the diversity of ideas in European public space, this surely sounds as an anathema. All of the above mentioned newspapers are namely published by Pearson, a UK media company, their target public being business and political types; it’s therefore not surprising that by and large they all toe the business-friendly editorial line.

They might not seem as such, but fiscal policy, derivatives regulation and bankers’ bonuses are politically highly charged issues in times of economic crisis. So it is particularly dangerous for a professional involved in these issues, either as a politician, journalist or a PR person, to have his views about the economic policy shaped by a very limited number of potentially biased sources.

Who sells what to whom?

As one cogent summary of Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s classic text, Manufacturing consent, has it:

“It is clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a product to readers – they are in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers. It is not just “that stories should increase readership or audience” – they should sell the right readership to the right advertisers.”

As a former editor-in-chief of a small niche newspaper, I can only attest to the accuracy of this analysis. Media content is consciously being produced in such a way as to set up a supportive environment for advertisers whose money pays the wages.

Taking the Wikipedia definition of biodiversity, “the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem … often used as a measure of the health of biological systems”, we may safely conclude that European public space is not very well served by a relatively small number of influential media having a limited scope of views on offer.

Blogs to the rescue

Luckily, however, world wide web (WWW) is another ecosystem altogether. Although democratic to a fault, giving just anybody a chance to speak his or her mind on anything and then publish it for everybody to see, a number of high-quality blogs have undermined the traditional media by offering a wider array of opinions that run counter to those promoted in the mainstream. Take the debt problems plaguing the European economy.

Taking their cue from textbook economics, all European governments are engaged in deficit cutting that is supposed to lay foundations for stronger growth in the future. The majority of pundits and journalists see this as a painful but necessary belt-tightening. But not the blogosphere.

The roll call

Here’s where the blogs come in. They allow economists such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to provide up-to-date commentary of economic developments that does not really fit into the business pages of a newspaper. They allow senior officials such as former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson to air unorthodox views about economic policy that hardly feature in mainstream coverage of economic issues. And then there are Cassandras (Edward Hugh’s EuroWatch, for example) who forecast the troubles the eurozone now finds itself mired in when mainstream media still applauded the EU for its dexterity to avoid the American-style financial meltdown.

But something certainly has changed since I was churning out agency news a couple of years ago. For me, the blogosphere has taken over from elite media as the provider of high-quality analysis of economic issues. It is always very interesting to contrast the latter with newspaper columns as it allows one to tease out hidden assumptions that govern the media construction of reality. At a time when debates rage about who is going to foot the bill of the crisis, bankers or taxpayers, blogs are becoming all the more important.

Martin Luther starring in "When Luther came to Brussels"

Swedish-speakers were given a real insider treat when former Brussels correspondent Emily von Sydow some ten years ago published a recollection of her insights into Sweden’s first years in the EU maze.

The year was 1995. It had been close, almost 50–50, but here we arrived – with Luther in the back of our heads. Sweden and Finland had joined the family, over two decades behind their southern partner Denmark, the Latin of the North. Protestant Nordics, champions of openness and modern administration, had entered a predominantly catholic union of peoples, characterized by French-inspired bureaucracy, centralisation and an air of secretiveness.

Blow of fresh air?

Blow of fresh air? Or an unavoidable clash of cultures? Women and men driven by ideals such as good order and discipline, pragmatism, punctuality and equality came to realise it was a matter of learning, adjusting and surviving. And transparency? In a culture of leaking bits of information to the chosen ones it soon became evident it was – if not all, but almost – about whom you know. Information is power, indeed.

Transparency train

Yet the debate had already emerged, in the 1980s, on the European agenda. Conscious of the democracy deficit, lack of openness and the need to try to “bridge the cap” between Brussels’ elites and the people… EU’s main three institutions took action, during the 1990s, to allow access to their documents.

Breakthrough came in 1997. With Amsterdam, transparency and openness finally made a real, though still restricted, entrée into Europe’s decision-making. The treaty stipulated EU citizens’ right to know and called for action to put it in place.

Transparency, simplicity and efficiency in EU decision-making were priorities unlikely to be presented by another than a Nordic Presidency. Finns got there first in 1999. Yet it was in May 2001, under the Swedish Presidency, that the EU finally got its first serious set of rules on access to EU institutions’ documents – symbolic or not.

Has progress been made?

A question I put some months ago to British Labour MEP Michael Cashman, Parliament’s rapporteur for the first ever EU regulation on access to documents. “Yes, but” – he answered. The MEP, having become “something of a train spotter” for transparency, has now been working on the 9-year old EU rules’ revision.

Certain institutional and cultural reluctance towards transparency still exists, Cashman noted. Speaking about year 1999, former EastEnders‘ star explained: “It was felt that it would slow up the work of institutions, that they would be less effective and that somehow scrutiny was something to be worried about”.

New clothes needed

“But there are also faults and the clothes we gave to the first born are no longer fitting”. In order to make access to documents easy, Cashman has proposed, among others, a common register for EU institutions’ documents, “one doorway saying European Union access to documents, where you go in and type your request”.

“If you are a journalist, if you are a lobbyist, you will know your way around the maze”. Exercising and testing the boundaries of the right to access EU documents has fallen largely in the hands of those who already “believe” and know. Statewatch for example is notoriously famous for having drafts on sensitive issues such as the EU–US “SWIFT” agreement even ahead of the MEPs. And if you are not? “Citizens should be able to access documents online, despite the administrative burden”, Cashman argues.

With Lisbon the EU entered yet another era in transparency, the new treaty reconfirming the need to take decisions “as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen”. Making the EU’s other legislator, the Council, to legislate doors open, “people will see in Finland, the UK, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, wherever, that things are not imposed by Brussels, but actually agreed by their governments acting in Council. And they’ll be able to see how their governments voted”, Cashman reminds us.

With the risk of starting to sound all too complacent, one cannot talk about transparency without mentioning the European Ombudsman. The EU’s first ever parliamentary watchdog Jacob Söderman got credit for being a “people’s champion” for openness, like European Voice put it, dressing, well, the Finn, as a crusader. Despite years of work in this field, the successor Greek Nikiforos Diamandouros still faces similar challenges: of the 355 inquiries he completed in 2008 , 36 % dealt with a lack of transparency, including a refusal to provide information or documents.

Why does transparency matter?

With Lisbon the EU entered yet another era in transparency, the new treaty reconfirming the need to take decisions “as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen”. Making the EU’s other legislator, the Council, to legislate doors open, “people will see in Finland, the UK, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, wherever, that things are not imposed by Brussels, but actually agreed by their governments acting in Council. And they’ll be able to see how their governments voted”, Cashman reminds us.

Citizens have a right to know. This is pure basics of a democratic system. Without knowing what is being and has been decided, and why, you cannot participate, nor can you try to hold decision-makers accountable.

Right to know and be informed

That brings us to the other side of the coin: the administration’s duty to inform and communicate its work and decisions – in an understandable way. Yet we know that communication involves choices. It cannot therefore replace the right to access information and documents.

Transparency, openness, access to documents, clarity of EU communication… these all are keys to the legitimacy of EU politics and laws so dearly sought after.

The hurdles of opening up EU’s businesses to citizens’ participation and oversight will be back on the MEPs’ plate after the summer break. After having been stalled at an interinstitutional level, the stumbling blocks now seem to be indoors the one-year-old new Parliament.

What do EU and dogs have in common?

“A very typical Finnish subject!” was the reaction when I recently mentioned my interest in transparency issues in a job interview. Sure: we Nordics tend to have a special liking for the case of open administration, and like to think we have worked to get the rest of the EU on board. A lot has changed since 1995, much for the better, and also not only thanks to the Nordics. The EU itself has almost doubled in size. But transparency and openness still matter and benefit all of us, no?

…As for von Sydow, unlike many other Swedes and Finns, she doesn’t seem to have grown tired of Brussels ways. She writes, just around the EP corner, on European affairs – and sometimes dogs.

No, this isn’t one more European’s rant against our transatlantic sister. It actually concerns something entirely different: viral marketing, the unruly cousin of any “proper” communication strategy that seems to have followed the same path with astonishing speed.

I don’t remember exactly when or what my first exposure to viral marketing was, but I’m pretty sure it was some YouTube video a few years ago. I am also almost certain it concerned a car but that’s all I can say. It was however a revelation. It was clever, funny and just a little dangerous. It wouldn’t bring the froth to the mouth of any of the usual defenders of our “public morality”, but you knew that this little clip could never
find a slot on any TV channel on earth. Yet within weeks, days maybe, thousands upon thousands had seen it. More importantly perhaps they had chosen to watch it, rather than have it blasted at them across the living room during the semi-conscious twilight of the ad break.

We saw it all, from the unruly children advertising contraception, to the superhero grannies advertising cars that are hard to steal, to remember just a couple. And I am speaking of viral ads here, not viral videos in general which are quite different: they don’t “sell” anything and in that sense fall outside the scope of this post.

The original viral ad, whichever that was, and the clips that followed by the hundreds, were almost uniformly brilliant. Something you could and would discuss with your friends and colleagues. What was most important however, from a marketing point of view, wasn’t so much the naughtiness, as the nagging sense of disbelief. Is this a “real ad”? Is it the work of some unknown YouTube Kurosawa, toiling away in the family loft when he ought to have a proper job, a family and a… real car? Who knew?

Somehow, at the back of everyone’s conscience it was pretty clear that the “viral”, being as slick as it was, could only be the work of pros and so another theory quickly emerged: that they were produced by advertising companies and then dumped by the customer for being too racy, only to find their way onto the web.

I remember that close to 90% of the discussion wasn’t on the clip itself, brilliant though it was but on whether it was a mistake, a trick, a real ad that had made it to YouTube, whether the company advertised was behind it or not. Yet even that was more suspension of disbelief than outright credulousness. It did get the discussion going though and that was the point.

It was, in short, revolutionary. It probably cost as much as a proper ad to create and then essentially nothing to disseminate. And it was cool in the way Captain Jack Sparrow will always, by definition, be cooler than his redcoat nemesis.

And then within a very, very few years, months maybe, captain Sparrow pulled up a leprous coat-sleeve to reveal the red underneath. No one can have any illusions any more and to crown it all, there are now even “official” virals, with a very basic Google search turning up hundreds of examples.

Let me be clear on one thing. It is neither naughty nor illegitimate. In fact its far more legitimate than a “true” viral in the sense that those putting out “official” virals own up to them from the start, even presenting them in… official press events. In reality, their “viral” aspect is making them available on the web and hoping they are good enough to be spread by people. Maybe that is what viral is all about: encouraging people to spread your message for you because said message is good enough (read funny enough) to merit spreading.

In fact it’s pretty brilliant. If I see something truly good on the web, I will send the link out to my friends. But, come to think of it, I will rarely send it out to everyone I know,  only those I know will appreciate it: I will in a sense do the audience-targeting myself because I know that if I send it to someone who won’t, or can’t, get it, I will end up with an egg on my face.

I did it back when we thought the virals were pirate stuff and I do it now that we know they aren’t exactly that and the rate at which I, in turn, receive viral ads from my friends hasn’t exactly diminished. If anything it has grown proving the value of the medium.

Yet there is something missing. Maybe it’s the titillation of not really knowing if it is real marketing or not that does it. Or maybe the fact that an official viral has to maintain all or most of the decorum expected of a proper ad. The new virals may be good, even very good, but the smoke-and-mirrors magic show has left the scene, the giggly mystery of the country fair magician is lost.

It is like discovering that Sparrow isn’t Teach but Drake, not a really a pirate but a privateer, doing his stuff on a “letter of marque” issued by the throne. Drake was more effective and historically important than the Blackbeard. But whom of the two does every schoolchild know?

An official viral can still be funny and effective as a marketing tool, but it is also like discovering that it’s FIFA employees who blow the vuvuzelas. It somehow takes all the fun out of it and along with the fun maybe, just maybe, it takes away some of the marketing effect. Or does it?

It’s perfect internet material: short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and, yes, a fair hormonal charge. Here it is:

“Look at your man, now back to me, now back to your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me.”

Actually, I’m a little worried. I showed this to my wife yesterday and I’m convinced she’s watched it 146 times since then – and she’s still laughing! She may actually have watched the other one I showed her more often. This is the previous commercial from March, featuring “the man your man could smell like”, this one approaching 12 million views on YouTube. (Maybe I’m getting Old Spice for Christmas.)

You know you want to watch it. Here it is:

Now, I’m not Tayebot, and I’m not sure I can theorise satisfactorily about how this works in advertising terms. But I can spend a harmless few minutes wondering whether we have anything to learn from this.

Well, yes. Be short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and, yes, pack a fair hormonal charge.

Be short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and pack a fair hormonal charge

Not on a horse

And then get a budget to do something like this… I can’t track down a figure for the single videos, the best I can find is a media blog reporting that Old Spice advertising to June in 2010 cost 20 million dollars, the equivalent of 2/3 of its whole 2009 advertising budget. Sigh! We can only dream.

However, there is one interesting thing we can relate to in these advertisements: they (the first at least) are NOT loaded with computer-generated effects. Take my word for it, or watch this “making of” programme. It was done in one shot, with just a little photoshop-style tidying-up afterwards. Just like our lipdub. Yeah, right…