7 Reasons Tina Brown is Spanking Arianna Huffington’s Butt
January 28, 2009 by Craig Stoltz
About six months into the adventure, Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast news-and-comment website is already far superior to Arianna Huffington’s fantastically popular supra-blog Huffington Post. Why, you ask?
1. The Daily Beast delivers less content than HuffPo. Web users need people smart enough to tell us what to ignore. These people are called “editors.”
2. DB views the world with a cocked eyebrow. HuffPo is wide-eyed. Skeptics are more interesting to spend time with than believers.
3. When you’re hungry, DB is a funky buffet line. HuffPo is a food bank.
4. DB understands that politics exists within pop culture. HuffPo thinks pop culture is the sideshow to politics.
5. DB, despite its proprietor’s print heritage, understands that web users scan, dip and click. HuffPo, despite its web-native heritage, thinks web users “read articles.”
6. Daily Beast publishes some original work by accomplished professional writers who are paid for their work in U.S. dollars. HuffPo depends mostly on the generous contributions of people like you.
7. Daily Beast is easy on the eyes. HuffPo is a beast.
Interesting assessment. I agree with some of the observations; however, I wonder how you define “superior.” Certainly, TDB provides a more user-friendly experience. However, I do wonder which is on the trajectory to be more influential (i.e., cited across multiple media channels), more financially prosperous, and more widely read. Perhaps it’s too early to get reasonable data for comparison.
Hallelujah - in this day of Twitter, someone actually realizes that we need editors. What a novel thought. Thank you for your observation.
Yes, I am tired of reading about someone’s airline schedule, what they ate, and all the other nonsense on Twitter.
Many fair points. I wouldn’t agree with all of them. For instance, what about those of us who do enjoy reading articles? As BrooklynDodger put it, it depends on your definition of “better.”
Ah, and regarding point 7, both sites are full of boxes and words. I have trouble seeing the difference between lots of red and lots of blue/green.
After reading your article, I had another look at The Daily Beast. Up ’til now I’ve only ever felt the need to read about 3 of their articles. Looking again just now didn’t change that. Tina Brown is too much the slick mag editor & she’s working too fast so the Daily Beast is in an awkward spot between the quality you can get in a well edited print magazine and the of-the-moment gossipiness of the web. While I don’t love the Huffington Post, I do feel the need to hop over once a day or so. The Daily Beast doesn’t seem to need my attention unless someone tells me a specific article is worth reading.
Thanks all for the great comments.
To the large question, but “far superior” I meant. . .that I like it a lot more. [It's a vice of mine to turn opinion into proclamation.] But I think I also mean it’s more engaging, easy to navigate and, for me, a better way to spend 5 minutes clicking around the news stream.
And to Ken’s point of editing: The longer I spend working with and reading online content sites, the more I am coming to appreciate that thoughtful, creative aggregation is a true journalistic craft. There is so much signal and noise out there, a good mind that can present it efficiently, in a way that’s both intellectually engaged and reader-focused, is a powerful asset. So often this task falls to low-level producers who havent’ developed a journalistic sensibility.
And per comments I’ve received by e-mail, I apologize to all I have unsettled with a long-lasting mental image of Tina Brown spanking Arianna Huffington.
Funny that they both run off the same IP address! 84.45.224.15 at the time of writing…