Change is scary.
You grow up wanting to “be” something—a ballplayer, business person, artist, public servant, union worker, builder, programmer, teacher, or writer. You get a fixed idea of what that means. You imagine the daily routines, the friendships, the rewards, the prestige. And if you get a taste of success, you decide, consciously and subconsciously, that the system rewarding you is the way things ought to be,
Then things change. New technologies change the way people do business. New markets emerge, undermining old markets and relationships. Jobs that used to reward people disappear. In their place, new jobs defy the old hopes and dreams. You lose your sense of self, your confidence, your faith in the system. You start to believe that the world does not honor you anymore. And maybe you’re right.
Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” As the market churns away, new technologies and processes render old ones obsolete. You get all kinds of exciting new industries and careers, products and services. But the old ones disappear, pitilessly. It’s hard. Just ask an old autoworker in Detroit, a steelworker in Pittsburgh, or a textile worker in North Carolina.
Or just ask a newspaper reporter or author.
We are in the midst of the greatest literary revolution since Gutenberg. A. J. Liebling once remarked that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” Until the PC and Internet, the ability to speak to an audience was limited to the people in control of the presses and studios. If you wanted to write an article about, say, the city council’s zoning policy or the president’s wars, you needed to buy or rent the means of production (presses) or get the approval of one of their gatekeepers (publishers and editors). If you wanted to write a book, you needed to get the nod from the mandarins on Publisher’s Row.
To become a writer, you needed to be part of the guild. And that was not always easy.
It’s all different now. Anyone can put up a blog, for free. Anyone can post comments on an Internet site, for free. Anyone can post a book on Amazon, for free. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, for free. Anyone can start a movement and build a community, for free.
If you want to say something, you can do so. There’s no guarantee that anyone will read it, but you can put out your ideas and arguments, stories and plans, for all the world to see.
These days, everyone’s a writer. We are on the crest of a literary revolution. Roll over, Gutenberg.
The flip side of this openness is that the group troops of the old order – reporters, editors, researchers, authors – have lost their special place. Newspapers and magazines are dying or cutting back, laying off staff. Advertisers have found other media to sell their wares. Journalism and publishing have not figured out how to survive in this brave new world. It’s scary.
You talk with journalists and authors and editors these days, and there’s a brittleness. It’s doom-and-gloom time. They don’t know what the future holds, so they cling to their old ideas. They recognize that change is coming—hell, it’s arrived—but they want to play familiar roles in the new world.
A New Vision of Journalism
Revolutionary change requires visionaries. The best leaders not only embrace new technologies, but also hold on to the best values of the ancien regime. They understand that human needs and values are eternal, that new technologies offer new opportunities to pursue those values. They have empathy for the people who lose everything in the revolution. But they focus on opportunities rather than lamenting loss.
One of the leading figures in the Literary Revolution—Arianna Huffington, the founder of the online magazine The Huffington Post—is The Elements of Writing’s 2010 Person of the Year.
If Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington did not exist, someone would have to invent her. She is the perfect symbol of the media in the age of the internet, globalism, and amateur-specialists.
Born in Greece in 1950, Arianna Stassinopoulos convinced her mother Elli to leave her father because of his philandering. Elli had no money, education, or connections, but she left anyway anyway to claim her own identity and independence. And that’s what she encouraged Arianna to do as well, when she urged her to apply to Cambridge University. Arianna got in and excelled at debating and writing.
Arianna Huffington’s first book, The Female Woman, was a post-feminist manifesto. Since then she has written books about artists (Picasso and Maria Callas), mythology (The Gods of Greece), the modern spiritual malaise (After Reason and The Fourth Instinct), a satire on the Clinton-Gingrich years (Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom), and the culture of corruption in Washington (Pigs at the Trough). Her latest, Fanatics and Fools, offers a new left vision for America.
At one point, everyone thought Arianna was angling to become America’s first lady. She married a Houston oil heir named Michael Huffington, who served in the State Department in the Reagan years, in 1986. Michael spent an unprecedented sum of $5.4 million to win election to Congress as a Republican from California in 1992. Two years later he spent $28 million in an unsuccessful bid for the Senate. In 1998 he announced that he was bisexual. The couple divorced.
At this point Arianna was the glamour lady of conservatism. She was caught up in the Gingrich Revolution. Always a social butterfly, she alighted on Comedy Central with Al Franken and continued to articulate a new blend of independence and mutuality, feminism and traditionalism, glamour and combativeness. She extended her reach and vision beyond the right and the GOP. She gathered movie stars, academics, politicians, artists, authors, athletes in salons.
Rather than fearing change, she seemed to delight in it. Maybe it was her own personal odyssey of change that made its inevitability so obvious to her. But more than any other figure in the politico-media-art axis, she seemed to relish the coming of the new—while, in her own way, holding on to Old World values.
In 2005—five short years ago, around the same time YouTube launched—she founded The Huffington Post. It was a natural extension of her personality, an online version of her ongoing salons. HuffPo provided … what?
The Power of the Post
On one level, HuffPo is just another aggregator—that is, a site that grabs other people’s work from the web and puts it all in a dynamic package. The site consists of hundreds of new links every day, arranged into traditional “sections” but also according to hot topics. HuffPo is, in fact, exactly what Old Media titans harrumph about. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, the TV networks and cable outlets, and countless other media invest millions in research and reporting. And HuffPo and other aggregators and bloggers grab it, format it for their own purposes.
Traditional media lack a viable business plan for the age of the Internet and mobile media — their fault — but the complaint has merit. The traditional media do all the heavy lifting and Arianna’s elves and their ilk go out and take it and give it their own sizzle.
But, as Richard Nixon used to say, let me say this about that:
First, the old media need to figure out their own plan. If they want to sell ideas, they need to figure out how to make it work. It looks like they are finally doing that, more than a decade after web surfing became a national obsession. Most of the major newspapers and many smaller papers are starting to charge for online content. The Wall Street Journal has for years. The New York Times and Washington Post have announced plans to charge. The emergence of ereaders like the iPad—combined with the new national habit of clicking, which Steve Jobs popularized on iTunes—make it possible for old media to start selling subscriptions and stories.
But the fact that it took so long is not the fault of bloggers and aggregators.
Second, even though you could say they have been somewhat parasitic, The Huffington Post and bloggers have also created new conduits to newspapers and other old media. You post something interesting on the web and Arianna’s elves post it. Those posts direct traffic to the original site.
But there’s more. HuffPo is generating mountains of its own content. Whenever a big story breaks, a new flock of experts and commentators emerges to talk about it. Hundreds of bloggers post on HuffPo. The list includes old-style pol pundits (Howard Fineman), academic wonks (Graham Allison), New Age gurus (Naomi Wolf, Judith Orlaff), health gurus and foodies (David Katz, Jeanne Ponessa Fratello), TV and movie executives (Aaron Sorkin), lapsed pols (Al Gore, Art Agnos), musicians (Neil Young, Madonna), humorists (Andy Borowitz), management gurus (Steve Covey), and more.
HuffPo has also been hiring a flock of new old media hands and developing video blog pages.
Everything seems to come HuffPo’s way, like marbles rolling down a slanted table. In fact, you could say that The Huffington Post is one of the prime centers of media reinvention.
Despite Arianna’s conservative past, HuffPo has a lib-prog-lefty slant. It does not represent right-wing thinking much. Oh, you’ll find Log Cabin Republicans and relatives of conservative politicians like Candace Gingrich. But you won’t find an all-out case for limited government or contracting out. Maybe that’s a flaw. Or maybe it’s a gap waiting to be filled. No reason why HuffPo couldn’t offer a home to Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, City Journal folks, flat taxers, foreign policy experts concerned about human rights and proliferation. In fact, I would expect HuffPo to become a much richer ideological stew over the years.
Arianna’s Way
If Arianna Huffington did not come along, someone else might have invented a similar aggregator site, right? Well, maybe. But would it be the same? Would it combine the smarts, the breadth of vision, the diversity of viewpoints, the verve?
You could say that someone might have invented a people-friendly computer, a people-friendly MP3 player, a people-friendly smartphone, and a people-friendly e-tablet had Steve Jobs and Apple not come along. But we don’t know. Sometimes, history bends to the vision of once-in-a-blue-moon entrepreneurs. I think you can say that about both Arianna Huffington and Steve Jobs.
The ultimate fuel for the Huffington Post comes from Arianna Huffington’s personality. She’s a case study of the Lois Weisman principle. Weissman, remember, is the woman who connects people in Chicago’s intersecting worlds of politics, policy, parks, media, the arts, and neighborhoods. Malcolm Gladwell made her famous with his 1999 New Yorker profile. Arianna plays the same role with writers, thinkers, performers, activists, builders, producers, futurists, and curiosity-seekers. She connects them — both in person and on her site.
The Internet is the ultimate free-for-all. Anyone who can say the words “dot” and “com” has a website. The quality is wildly uneven. There are no real standards.
But it’s one thing to post blogs, and quite another to give the blogosphere some coherence. Somehow, the centrifugal forces of the Internet needs something to relate them to each other.
HuffPo is, above all, a place of journalistic and civic experimentation. Arianna and her team play around with any story—or information, videos, pictures, whatever can be shared—to figure out what works. It’s still an open format, and it’s bound to face resistance from old-media producers. They make plenty of mistakes. But that’s the point.
Someone has to try new approaches to gathering and distributing the news. To be sure, HuffPo is far from the only kid on the block. But it’s the kid that seems to draw a crowd and delight in doing whatever possible to get them talking about the issues that people care about.
No one knows how the old media will emerge from this revolution. Will The Times get its sea legs again? Will old newspapers, magazines, and pubishers adapt to the electronic readers with an iTunes-style instant-click format? Will WikiLeaks transform investigative reporting into a game of document dumps, with blogs and reports by amateurs and pros? Will writers and artists create new combinations of words and images? Will any new media formula be able to recreate the voice of authority once held by The New York Times and Walter Cronkite?
No one knows. But it’s a fair bet that at the center of media reinvention will a woman who has spent a lifetime finding new roles and exploring new ideas.