HuffPo and the economic crisis

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

The Huffington Post used three methods of covering the economic crisis — aggregating content from other media, what its bloggers wrote and reporting by its small staff, said founder Arianna Huffington on Tuesday.

Aggregated stories would have paragraphs highlighted, or “splashed” on the site.  “By splashing it, we immediately give it value,” said Huffington. “It gives it a kind of resonance that it doesn’t have.”

Huffington Post has about 3,000 bloggers who have their own password and can post on their site. Then editors decide which ones to put on the front page.

As for the small reporting team in Washington and New York, “We would discuss with them what they are going to be covering,” said Huffington.

Huffington was speaking Tuesday at a conference called “Facing the Fracture” at Columbia University on coverage of the economic crisis.

One of the issues with the coverage was the concern among regulators as to how media would impact Wall Street companies in trouble.

“There was this immediate fear that Wall Street was going to collapse because of the coverage,” said Huffington, likening Wall Street firms to Victorian ladies who would faint at the drop of a hat.

Another concern was using economists and regulators as sources who were extremely detailed in their explanations of what was happening.

“This was so overwhelming that whetever the experts said should go,” said Huffington. “So it was a constant battle to not have the experts hide behind the complexity.”