Huffington: No going back for traditional media
Traditional media needs to evolve or they will become dinosaurs, blogger and author Arianna Huffington said in a keynote speech at the Online Media, Marketing and Advertising conference in Hollywood on Monday.
The New York Times partially gets that message, she says. For instance, the newspaper has a service that allows Internet users to customize their views of the online version of the newspaper. But then it charges for premium content. "Content online has to be free," she says. "Unless it's porn or financial news, don't charge for it."
She also complained that news outlets are so busy chasing the story du jour that they overlook important events. "Mainstream media has amnesia," she says, noting that often the big stories of the recent past are all-too-quickly forgotten, like the war in Kosovo and the ill-fated immigration attempt of young Cuban Elian Gonzalez.
Blogs represent a "new media for people who have views and want to see them part of the (current events discussion) in real-time," she says.
Some bloggers who contribute to her blog, The Huffington Post, don't even have to use the Internet; she accepted faxed blog postings from historian Arthur Schlesinger before he died last month. She also accepts faxed contributions from comedian Larry David, cranky star of his own autobiographically based HBO series.
Like the title of her new book On Becoming Fearless, Huffington says media companies may not always get it right in their transition to a digital world. They have to be willing to experiment, try new things and accept a failure rate, she says. Search engine and ad powerhouse Google even owns up to only a 20 percent success rate among things it tries, and that is considered high, Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products and user experience, told Huffington recently.
Part of getting to the top of any game is "acknowledging failure as a steppingstone to success," Huffington said.
Huffington also commented briefly on the latest big news out of the technology industry--Viacom's $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google's YouTube. "When will big organizations learn that suing is not the way to run the world?" she asked rhetorically.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
