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Future of Journalism - Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington: 'Mainstream media suffer from attention defecit disorder'. Photograph: Anna Gordon
Arianna Huffington: 'Mainstream media suffer from attention defecit disorder'. Photograph: Anna Gordon

Arianna Huffington: obsessiveness is the greatest strength of online news

This article is more than 14 years old
Huffington tells Activate 09 conference the tenacity of online journalists is a contrast to mainstream media attitude

Arianna Huffington, head of the blogging empire that bears her name, said that without the internet, Barack Obama would not have been elected - but added that to help him realise his goals for reform, internet activism needs to act as a "countervailing force" against entrenched interests.

Huffington was speaking at the Guardian's Activate 09 conference, looking at how technology and the internet are changing society.

President Obama took office with an ambitious agenda to reform energy, Wall Street and healthcare, but he has failed to reform the energy and financial industries and is now fighting a fierce battle to reform healthcare, she said.

"The vested interests fighting reform and the past which they represented are very well organised, and the future that they resist is very poorly organised," she said.

She compared the opponents of reform to the US auto industry. Car manufacurers in Detroit spent time looking to their past, and acted in ways that were not only contrary to society's interests but also their own, Huffington said. They fought against increasing fuel efficiency standards in the US as competitors in Japan and Europe built cars that met the growing demand for efficiency.

"I'm interested in how technology can be a countervailing force" to these entrenched interests, Huffington said.

She talked about how the Sunlight Foundation in the US was putting up data about government spending online so that citizens could see more easily how their tax money was being spent.

As the healthcare debate began, US public broadcaster NPR posted a picture of the hearings in congress. They posted a photo of the 200 people who crowded into the committee room. Instead of simply taking photos of the 22 senators, their photographer turned his lens on the audience. NPR said:

When 22 senators started working over the first healthcare overhaul bill on June 17, the news cameras were pointed at them - except for NPR's photographer, who turned his lens on the lobbyists. Whatever bill emerges from congress will affect one-sixth of the economy, and stakeholders have mobilised. We've begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going. Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is - email dollarpolitics@npr.org or let us know via Twitter @DollarPolitics.

As information came in, they added it to the photo. By mousing over icons in the photo, people can see who the lobbyist is and how much money they made from healthcare clients last year. For instance, Kate Leeson of law firm Holland & Knight made $2.3m from health care clients last year.

The photos have now "gone viral", and been passed on by millions of people on the internet. Data alone is not enough, Huffington said. "Data needs to go viral."

Next week, the Huffington Post will start "liveblogging the lobbyists", she said. They will be calling on their network of 13,000 citizen journalists and 20 million users to help them crowdsource information on lobbyists in the US.

She said that the greatest thing that internet users can bring to the world is our obsessiveness. She added:

Mainstream media suffer from attention deficit disorder. New media suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Josh Marshall, investigative journalist and the founder of the Talking Points Memo blog, obsessively covered the firing of government attorneys by the Bush administration. Long after the mainstream media had moved on, his team kept digging and kept the story alive, believing that the attorneys were fired for political and not performance reasons. Their dogged coverage eventually led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Comparing traditional investigative journalism to Talking Points Memo methods, she said: "If Josh Marshall had disappeared for six months and then wrote a blockbuster piece, maybe nothing would have happened."

Recently, there were two bills in front of congress that Huffington thought should pass easily, one to deal with the foreclosure crisis and another to reform the credit card business. Banks were able to kill the foreclosure bill because even though they were responsible for the financial meltdown, they still wield enormous political power.

However, credit card reforms passed because citizens were energised. They counterbalanced the lobbying efforts from banks.

Internet: Self-correcting system

Addressing the concern that the internet has led to the spread of rumour and disinformation, she said that the internet is a self-correcting system.

Smear campaigns became much harder, she said, adding, "It became much harder to convince American voters that Barack Obama was a Muslim socialist, an angry black man."

People posted Obama's 36-minute address on race to counter videos circulating on the internet of his minister, the incendiary Reverent Jeremiah Wright, saying "Goddamn America".

"If it were not for the internet, Barack Obama would never have been elected president," she said.

And the Obama administration has continued to tap the network they built to get elected. Using their website, Organising for America, they have collected hundreds of thousands of stories on healthcare to support their reform efforts.

Responding to the call to service by the Obama Administration, people wanted to build a CraigsList for volunteering, launching the site All For Good. It helps people to find volunteer opportunities that match their interests and passions.

The internet and Iran

Like the rest of the world, she has been watching events unfold in Iran New media stepped into the vacuum as Iran stepped in to to silence journalists working in traditional media.

"The government tried to control the message, but there were so many people taking pictures with camera phones that they failed," she said.

She quoted Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am last year at the Democratic Party convention in Denver:

You consume old media sitting on a couch. You consume new media galloping on a horse.

Watching the brutality in Iran, you didn't just want to see the brutality. You wanted to do something about it, she said. It doesn't look like the reform forces in Iran will succeed, but the regime won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle, Huffington said.

How to save newspapers?

Introducing Huffington, the Guardian director of digital content, Emily Bell, said they had a picture of Arianna Huffington on the wall as they were launching Comment is Free. They often asked themselves: What would Arianna do?

Many in the traditional media have looked to the success of the Huffington Post and have looked to emulate it.

Someone in the audience asked if she had ideas on how to save newspapers - because the questioner believed newspapers also held totalitarian forces to account.

Huffington said: "I want to shift the debate from how to save newspapers to how to save journalism."

The Huffington Post is looking at a mixed profit and non-profit model. They have set up an investigative journalism fund, and she highlighted ProPublica, another foundation funded investigative journalism group in the US.

But there was no going back to the models of the past.

"This is the moment for experimentation. The old model of ignoring the link economy and putting content behind a pay wall will not work," she said.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Why a genuine message matters more than technology in online politics

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