The Washington Post also does actual reporting, unlike the Huffington Post; they actually produce something of value, even if they don't monetize it as successfully.
Perhaps those activities are being bifurcated, then. Perhaps the future of journalism looks like this: on one hand, you have news/data sources, like AP, who put the boots on the ground, do the reporting, and license that information to a wide variety of news outlets. On the other hand, you have the news outlets, who buy the information and translate it into content. The supplier gathers news and sells it to the publisher, who adds value to the raw news in the form of X, Y, Z, and sells ads around it. It's an industrial supply chain, like any other.
This has been happening for many decades now, especially in the TV news industry. If anything, I would expect the trend to accelerate and proliferate. It's going to become increasingly unprofitable to house the costs of news-gathering, and the revenue of ad-selling, under the same roof. A few outlets will keep at it, but on a much smaller and more selective scale, and mainly for specialized stories (investigative pieces, like the ones HuffPo does on occasion).
The implication is that the aggregated content lifted from other sites and the original content created by HuffPo writers gets 100x the traffic and eyeballs.
I wasn't; this is my serious face. I have yet to be impressed with the value of any of the content produced by HuffPo. In contrast, I regularly read Washington Post coverage, and the company has historically been involved in some of the major news stories that have shaped our society, such as Woodward and Berstein's Watergate Papers which they produced while working for the Washington Post. To this day, the company covers world events with reporters on the ground, with significant resources for them to leverage, and a relatively high level of journalistic integrity and editorial oversight, all brought to bear in order to bring us newsworthy stories with a solid reputation at stake.
HuffPo might grow into a respectable news organization one day, but they still have a long road to get there.
Not like HuffPo has some secret monetisation strategy, do they? Aren't they running online ads like most other news sites?
Could you have more accurately finished "even if most people don't care for content of value" or "even if they use more staff, resources and care to produce it"?
