Arianna Huffington's 7-Year Quest For Pulitzer-Worthy Journalism

After launching in 2005, the site became known - often controversially - for its heavy reliance on unpaid bloggers, aggregation of news from other sites and supplementing its political coverage with fluffy, often celebrity-focused news. It didn't take long for it to garner serious traffic, especially for left-leaning political news junkies. The site continued to grow dramatically as it was acquired by AOL last year for $315 million.

Courting Reporters and Investing in Journalism

Alongside its short-form blogging, news aggregation and celebrity slideshows, The Huffington Post has been investing in serious journalism for a few years now, an effort that appears to be paying off.

In 2009, the company launched the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, a $1.75 million effort designed to support investigative journalism on economic issues at a time when the economy was in deep recession and newspapers were not exactly booming either.

By the time the AOL merger began to be executed last year, HuffPost had already nabbed seasoned journalists from places like Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, often coaxing them with promises of greater editorial freedom and fewer of the kinds of constraints inherent in print media.

One of the site's more recent hires was David Wood, a veteran reporter with years of experience covering conflicts around the world. It was Wood's 10-part series about injured veterans that grabbed the attention of the Pulitzer committee and helped HuffPost make journalism history.

This shift toward original, in-depth and investigative reporting was reportedly something Huffington had in her sights since day one. As anybody who watches the news industry knows, the best journalism is often the most expensive to produce. Including investigative reporting in the initial operations of a news startup in 2005 was probably not as economically sustainable as unpaid blogging and slideshows.

Over time, however, the site has been able to grow traffic substantially enough to forge a viable business model and actually turn a profit. Today, it's able to support the kind of journalism that's capable of winning Pulitzers.

The road toward this growth hasn't been without its bumps. Early on, Huffington herself was forced to apologize to readers after it was revealed that a blog post allegedly written by George Clooney was actually a conglomeration of statements the actor had made in various interviews with other outlets. Since the beginning, the site's practice of using unpaid labor to produce content has been highly controversial. So has its use of aggregation, which drew harsh criticism last year from Bill Keller, who serving as the executive editor of The New York Times at the time.

It's clear now that the site's low overhead early on helped it grow into a force to be reckoned with in the news industry, for better or worse.

The site's latest accomplishment was aided not just by financial viability, but also the model that HuffPost employs. Since the site lacks many of the limitations of print publications - including print space as well as cultural issues - they're often better-equipped to let reporters drill down on stories with laser focus, often for many months at a time. This is the editorial freedom that Huffington promises veteran journalists when courting them.

Former New York Times reporter Peter Goodman was one of those reporters. As the American Journalism Review covered a year ago:

Goodman speaks highly of the Times (and of its executive editor, Bill Keller, who is not, as can be seen in a recent New York Times Magazine column, a big fan of Goodman's new employer). But there were limitations. For instance, when a front-page story on predatory for-profit colleges generated hundreds of e-mails, Goodman wanted to do another story on the topic -- but the paper had no place for it.

"My editors said, and I'm not criticizing them, 'Well, we already hit the subject,'" Goodman says. "Arianna's whole thing is, "This is the Web, let's hit it again and again. If we've got another one, let's hit it again.'"

The Huffington Post will, of course, still have its critics, in many cases rightly so. But this news - along with recent wins by Politico and ProPublica - is symbolic of a larger shift in journalism overall, even if it's one that's been underway for a few years.

Top 5 TEDxTeen Talks

Natalie Warne Believes in the Anonymous Extraordinaire

Natalie Warne begins her talk with a powerful reference to a picture of her mom as a 12-year-old girl, staring into the eyes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "When I was younger, I would stand on my tippy toes and stare into that picture," she says.

Warne is biracial, and experienced racism at an early age. She describes this in her talk as an identity crisis of sorts. As a result, she wanted to get through high school as quickly as possible. When she was 17, she discovered a film called Invisible Children, which is about the tragedy of Joseph Kony's child soldiers. That's when she also found her passion, and the power people have to fight for change.

Tavi Gevinson's Still Figuring It Out

Style blogger Tavi Gevinson's talk is called "Still Figuring It Out," but based on her talk alone, it seems like this girl has it mostly figured out. Or at least what there is to know right now.

Gevison is best known for her now four-year-old fashion blog StyleRookie and RookieMag.com, her online style magazine for teenager girls. In her TED talk, she discusses her take on feminism, pop culture, her love of fashion and what makes a powerful female character.

"What makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted," says Gevinson. "Instead, you get a two-dimensional superwoman, that maybe has one quality that is played up a lot - like a catwoman type - or she plays up her sexuality which is seen as power. But this is not powerful. Flaws are key."

She speaks honestly about what it means to be a feminist today, a word that for some reason still at times feels difficult to utter. She reassures young viewers that feminism is "not a rule book," and that, rather, it's a "discussion, conversation and a process."

How Tara Suri & Niha Jain Learned to Fail

Why aren't there any books on failing and failures? Why is everything about success and succeeding? That's what Tara Suri and Niha Jain want to know. Sure, there are terms like "epic fail" and the FAIL blog, but in reality, no one wants to talk about failure. Instead, people fear it. They hope it doesn't happen to them.

"In a culture that's all about 'winning,' some people even blatantly recast their mistakes," says Jain, as an image of Charlie Sheen flashes across the TEDxTeen PowerPoint screen.

The two girls chart their epic journey through the failure they experienced the previous summer when all they were trying to do was succeed. They wanted to change a community where 85% of women had been forced into prostitution. They had another plan. And it failed, in a good way.

"If we want to be game changers, we have to fail loudly and proudly," says Suri.

Curtis Kulig Is Obsessed With Love

"Love me, love me, love me," Kulig tells the TEDx audience. "Say it to the person next to you." Everything is about love.

Obsession is usually talked about as a bad thing - but for this adolescent, it was his obsession with love that got him here in the first place.

"My obsession has turned into my profession," he explains.

Perhaps you've heard of him. His simple "Love Me" logo can be found across the world, from spray-painted dumpsters to bottoms of skateboards to stickers, on Michael Stars T-shirts and Victoria's Secret materials. He's not a graffiti artist or a tagger. He's a culture maker, a message creator.

"I am writing 'love me' till my hands hurt," he says.

Khadim Diop Knows Frankenstein

Fifteen-year-old Khadim Diop is going to be a star. At age 5, he decided that he wanted to change the world.

His lyrical poetry walks the line between slam and rap, perfectly delivering a single message: "I am the promise of tomorrow," he says, fierceness in his eyes.

"Am I not worth the fight? I am the future."

These five teens are delivering just that, coupled with grace, eloquence and attitude. They are our future culture leaders.

"Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers," writes Alison Gopnik for The Wall Street Journal. "Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals."

Track Your Online Photos with VenueSeen.com

You can pick and choose all or some of the four networks that you want them to scan, as you see from the screenshot here.

The service is designed initially for retail consumer-oriented businesses that want to promote themselves, such as a restaurant or a clothing store or some other shopping destination. VenueSeen has solved the problem of aligning the various geolocation coordinates to make sure that the same Starbucks' shop shows up consistently from its four feeder sites and matching them up so you can see they were taken in the same place. In addition to consolidating photos, they also collect tips and reviews from these four sites into one place. There is also a handy stats widget that shows you where the photos from a particular location originated from.

Most b2b operations probably won't want to get involved, unless you want to share pics of your employees taken in their own offices. That could be pretty boring unless you have a quirky place in the South of Market district in San Francisco (such as SAYMedia, our parent company).

What You Need to Know About CISPA

What Is CISPA?

CISPA is different from SOPA and PIPA in that it's not primarily about piracy or privacy issues. Instead, it's intended to help fight cyber attacks.

But the bills share similarities that raise red flags with digital rights advocates. Foremost, the language of CISPA is vague, broad and leaves much open for interpretation.

CISPA would amend a current law that defines how cyber threat intelligence information is used between the U.S. intelligence community and the private sector. Currently, that's often difficult or prohibited. CISPA would remove that firewall.

It would be a two-way street, where the intelligence community could give private entities information (with proper security clearance) and would allow companies to voluntarily share information with the government. The bill does not say that companies must share information with the government.

The procedural elements are not what makes the bill concerning. The issue is how things in the bill are defined. This is where the vagueness comes in.

• Cybersecurity Provider: "A non-governmental entity that provides goods or services intended to be used for cybersecurity purposes."
• Cybersecurity Purpose, Cybersecurity System, Cyber Threat Information: "[An entity] designed or employed to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of, or safeguard, a system or network, including protecting a system or network from:

Efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.

What are "goods and services intended to be used for cybersecurity purposes?" A Facebook status update was never "intended" to be used for cybersecurity purposes. Yet, under this law, a Facebook status update could be seen in a variety of ways. The wording of the definitions leaves it open for the government to request information from Facebook (or any other digital information service) over the smallest of updates.

Who Supports CISPA?

The bill is sponsored by two representatives:

• Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His office wrote the bill.
• Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, ranking member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as a member on the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.
• The bill is cosponsored by 106 representatives. See the full list here.
• In addition, CISPA has a letter of approval from 28 large technology corporations and organizations. That includes Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Symantec, Verizon, AT&T and CTIA.

Who Opposes CISPA?

• There is a competing bill in the House of Representatives sponsored by Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) titled, "Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act" (the PRECISE Act). The Center for Democracy and Technology opposes CISPA but supports Lungren's bill.
• Civic organization Avaaz.org has collected more than 600,000 online petitions opposing CISPA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a paragraph on its site titled, "Don't Let Congress Use 'Cybersecurity' Fears to Erode Digital Rights." The Constitution Project's Virginia Sloan sent an open letter to "editorial page editors and writers" urging them to scrutinize CISPA.
• Hacker group Anonymous also opposes CISPA and has launched attacks against corporations that have stated support of the bill.

Does It Stand a Chance?

From a legislative perspective, CISPA is in a stronger place than SOPA ever was. It enjoys bipartisan sponsorship from Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and has 106 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, including the likes of Darrell Issa and Michelle Bachmann. Issa, as many will recall, was a staunch opponent to SOPA and holds influence as the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

What's Next?

CISPA made it through a Congressional committee in December with a 17-1 vote. It is currently being amended before going to a vote before the full House of Representatives on April 23.

The CDT, EFF, Demand Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union will launch a week-long campaign next week ahead of the voting on CISPA to protest the bill and educate citizens, and persuade them to contact their members of Congress to voice their concerns.

We will see if the anti-CISPA fervor reaches the level of the protests against SOPA and PIPA, but with some of the biggest technology companies supporting the bill, widespread blackouts are not likely.

Tomahawk: Fixing Our Fractured Digital Music Collections

No matter how hard it tries, no one individual digital music service is ever going to have a 100% comprehensive library. There are complex rights licensing issues, high costs and hesitant artists, for starters.

Meanwhile, the number of artists is exploding as old structures crumble and record labels become less relevant. A band you've never heard could be recording an album you're going to love right now and upload it to SoundCloud next week, with or without the help of a label. The video they post on YouTube could be so well-crafted that it goes viral and lands in your Facebook news feed next Tuesday. This is the new radio.

The proliferation of streaming services, aggregators and apps for music is great. That doesn't necessarily mean the experience is convenient for the user. To check out a new band I just heard about, I often have to jump from one service to another to find its music.

Tomahawk: An Infinite Music Library

This is precisely the problem that Tomahawk aims to solve. So far, it's doing a phenomenal job of it. To get an idea of what Tomahawk is, imagine if iTunes not only scanned your hard drive for MP3s, but also let you plug YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, ex.fm and a number of other digital music services into it.

That's Tomahawk. It's open source and completely free to download and use on both Macs and PCs.

"I have the rights, and ability, to access content from a large number of sources - yet no single interface that lets me easily do so," writes Jason Herskowitz, a digital music entrepreneur and contributor to the Tomahawk project. "Imagine a world where we share music metadata, and the logic of how that audio gets rendered is determined by the consumer of the data, not the sharer."

Last.fm comes close to bridging the various gaps between services, but only in terms of music recommendations. For actual consumption of music, there's never been a universal player that spans them all. Now there is.

When you run a search for an artist in Tomahawk, it looks through your personal collection, plus everything hosted on whatever Web-based services you plug into it. Spotify and Rdio boast several million tracks apiece. That's nice. Tomahawk puts an infinite selection of music into a single interface.

From Local Acts to The Beatles, It's All There

Last weekend, I saw a local, up-and-coming band from Philadelphia called Creepoid play a really great set during an all-day festival. The band was recently signed to a small label, so its stuff isn't yet available via my premium Spotify account, save for one song. It does, however, have tracks up on ex.fm and SoundCloud, as well as a few videos on YouTube.

Now, ultimately, what I should do in this case is pay actual dollars for the album on vinyl - and I totally will, I swear - but in the meantime, if I want to hear some of its stuff, Tomahawk makes it very, very easy to do so without going on a wild digital goose chase.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's The Beatles. Yes, those ever-stubborn digital holdouts. Their material finally landed on iTunes in 2009, six years after Apple's now all-mighty online music store launched. It's unlikely we'll see their catalog roll out to the all-you-can-stream services anytime soon. I thankfully own all of the band's albums in high-quality digital format stored on my laptop's hard drive. Tomahawk knows this and automatically includes those tracks in my collection.

Every artist - from the band you saw perform at a bar last weekend to The Beatles - can be played from the same iTunes-style UI. If the band has recorded anything and posted it pretty much anywhere online, it's here.

Whereas most online music services struggle with social integration, Tomahawk's effort is a valiant one. You can hook it up to your Google and Twitter accounts to share with friends there, and the app itself allows you to access the libraries and playlists of people on the same network P2P-style.

The social features could be deeper overall. For instance, I'd love to be able to follow a user on SoundCloud if I come across one of their shared tracks in Tomahawk. Still, it does social much better than a lot of music apps out there.

As with any music app worth trying, you can scrobble listens to Last.fm, which is noteworthy because it opens up scrobbling functionality to a wide range of online services that may not support it natively.

Not Without Its Drawbacks

Because Tomahawk scrapes the depths of sources like YouTube, Grooveshark and SoundCloud, there's much more here than just commercially released studio recordings. You can also stumble across live tracks, demos and covers, some of which are delightful finds.

This can also lead to undesirable results in some cases. For example, Tomahawk says it has John Lennon's "Imagine" album, but what it really has is a collection of covers, demos and official studio versions of each track, albeit in the correct order. This could be interesting for a superfan, but it's not the actual album and will probably disappoint the average listener. In a case like this, it's better to own the album as an MP3 or another locally stored digital format.

To add third-party sources like SoundCloud, YouTube and Spotify to Tomahawk, you need to go into the app's preferences and install what it refers to as content resolvers. Spotify and Grooveshark require premium accounts to work, but everything else is free to use. Unfortunately, Rdio and MOG are not supported.

Tomahawk is an open source project in beta mode, so it experiences the occasional hang up. By and large, it functions pretty smoothly, especially considering what it's doing under the hood. As long as you have a solid Internet connection, it plays back music from a wide variety of sources pretty seamlessly.

Cartoon: That's Your Strategy?

See more of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal

Microsoft Spins Off Open Source, Hopes to "Build Bridges"

Building a Bridge

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, Paoli characterized the creation of the new Microsoft subsidiary not so much as a reorganization but a confirmation of the evolving role of open source development at Microsoft. Some will continue to regard "Microsoft" and "open source" as opposite sides of a coin. But Paoli described his new subsidiary as a liaison between Microsoft's corporate entities and the open source community, and more than the masked voice of a commercial developer.

"The business case is literally around enabling scenarios for our customers that bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies," the new president told RWW. "That's basically the business goal."

One example Paoli cited was MongoDB, the open source NoSQL database system. While MongoDB is already effectively promoting the database, Microsoft Open Technologies is positioned to promote the use of MongoDB in conjunction with Microsoft technologies, especially the Windows Azure cloud service.

"That's an example of a non-Microsoft technology that originated with a brilliant open source community who understands a lot about big data, and we're very interested to start working with them to see how MongoDB can work on Windows Azure," Paoli said. "It's always going to be a bridge between a Microsoft technology and a non-Microsoft technology. Those are the use cases that we will really be working on."

Microsoft Can Now Speak With Two Voices

In many cases, Microsoft will have interests as both a commercial developer and an open source participant. The creation of the spinoff gives it a little wiggle room with respect to its open source positions. Microsoft Open Technologies can effectively stand for public and open standards if it so wishes, while Microsoft corporate continues to be the actual liaison for standards.

"Let me be frank: There are a number of differences between the process of developing proprietary software and the processes of the open source community," explained Paoli. "So in some cases, it is important to keep those processes separate. And in other cases, there is really room for great collaboration, interaction. Sometimes we want to keep things separate, and sometimes we need to have greater collaboration. This needs to be properly managed."

He cited a circumstance where a new community is developing around an open source product or technology - one with a deep technical brain trust and mixture of talents. Microsoft needs to be able to volunteer its participation, including helping to fix bugs and add features. "We need to be able to have it turn over very quickly, in the next 24 hours."

But as Paoli's response implies, the liaison with the community must not appear bound to corporate interests. That, too, will help expedite simple fixes and feature additions, and help Microsoft become perceived as an equal player in the open source community.

"All our customers expect the software they use will work in a heterogeneous environment. Customers expect their phone to connect to any cloud device; if you cannot receive your email on your phone, well, that's not good, irrespective of which phone or which cloud or which operating system they are connected to," Paoli said. "We live in a mixed IT world, and the goal is to provide customers with even more choice to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, because that's what customers expect."