Mallary Jean Tenore
Mar. 13, 2012
12:38 pm
When Mandy Jenkins
announced she was leaving her position as social media editor of The Huffington Post last month, she said she was "relieved to get out of the social media editor game." Now her successor,
Ethan Klapper, can’t wait to get into it.
Klapper, who is currently an online editor at National Journal, announced today that he accepted a job as social media editor in The Huffington Post’s D.C. bureau. When he starts his new job on March 26, he’ll be responsible for handling the
Huffington Post Politics Twitter and
Facebook accounts, and will be doing some product development as well.
Klapper said in a phone interview that he wants to help incorporate more social media into the Huffington Posts’s campaign coverage and is looking forward to learning from, and coaching, other staffers.
“I hope to learn more about how the reporters at such a big news outlet like The Huffington Post use social media in their daily lives, and I hope to be able to, based off my expertise, help them use it even better,” he said. “I hope to learn how they've become so successful in social media in the first place. What’s their formula? There’s a lot to learn from what they’ve done. I’ll always be learning in this job.”
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Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 12, 2012
4:53 pm
Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington, whose eponymous site is uber-optimized for social media, says the media is too obsessed with "going viral" instead of reporting substantive news. In
a lengthy column, Huffington acknowledges that HuffPost is "as aggressive as any media outlet in using social media," but warns:
The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. ... Social media are a means, not an end. And going viral isn't "mission accomplished," regardless of what it was that went viral.
Earlier: Plea to journalists: Stop using social media as cover for bogus trend stories (Poynter)
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Julie Moos
Mar. 2, 2012
3:01 pm
The Huffington Post had its largest audience ever this past Monday, due in part to its coverage of the Oscars. Social sharing gets some of the credit for the 13.3 million unique visitors that came to the site, which was recently identified by Newswhip research as
one of the top three most viral news sources. The most shared stories were about
the best- and
worst-dressed at Hollywood’s annual awards ceremony.
Monday’s 111.2 million page views topped the previous best day, Feb. 13, the day after the Grammys and also the first weekday after
Whitney Houston’s death. Stories about her and daughter
Bobbi Kristina, who was taken to the hospital that same weekend, were “very big drivers” of traffic that day, said HuffPost spokesperson Mario Ruiz by email. Entertainment is “a large part of our traffic, but events like this also include lots of style coverage,” Ruiz said, “so a lot of sites benefit across HPMG: Moviefone, Stylelist, HuffPost Style, etc.” The business executive who
oversees Moviefone and the other entertainment sites is leaving AOL, confirms Ruiz.
Kerry Trainor has been with the company since spring of 2010.
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Feb. 17, 2012
3:19 pm
Capital New York
Mario Ruiz, head of communications for The Huffington Post,
is leaving his position to start his own agency.
“I always wondered what would be the next step, and for me, the five-year mark of being at The Huffington Post is something I’ve been thinking about. It's a natural time to assess where I am in my life,” said Ruiz, noting that The Huffington Post will be one of his clients. "I have great affection and admiration for Arianna and the whole team, so I'm thrilled I'll be able to continue working with them."
Ruiz said by phone that he has a few other clients who will be in place soon, but he wouldn't name them. He hopes to work with a variety of clients, including nonprofits and media and tech companies.
Ruiz said he’s most excited about getting to choose which clients he works with: “In the back of my mind, what always made sense was starting my own firm. I worked for agencies before, so I know what it's like to juggle clients, but now I'll get more control over which clients I get to work with.”
Ruiz, who works with a team of three other PR staffers, said The Huffington Post is now looking to hire someone else.
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 13, 2012
6:34 am
Jeremy W. Peters’ story about The Washington Post in Sunday’s New York Times is a fine addition to the canon of
Washington-Post-at-a-crossroads-or-perhaps-about-to-die stories. It takes a place alongside Gabriel Sherman’s 2010 “
Post Apocalypse,” Harry Jaffe’s “
Marcus Brauchli is Sinking the Washington Post” and Erik Wemple’s “
This Bag Is Too Heavy” (full disclosure: I helped copyedit the latter). Bonus points to Peters for reporting on purported tensions between executive editor Brauchli and publisher Katharine Weymouth over cuts to staff.
>>Meanwhile, the Post’s ombudsman worries about what the announced buyouts
mean to the paper’s mission.
• The
five Sun journalists arrested this weekend were
all middle-aged, and the information leading to their arrests came from News Corporation, a former News International executive
said. Justice is wonderful, and if it helps slide a few mid-career salaries off the books, hey, that’s just lagniappe! (Flashback: In November, Sun editor Dominic Mohan tried to assure staffers that journalists would
not alone be blamed for a journalism scandal.) Also, the Sun would like
the government to leave it be. Most over-the-top anonymous quote from a rattled Sun journalist comes courtesy of the Telegraph: “
This is behaviour reminiscent of Mugabe.” Note: If you work for Rupert Murdoch, go easy on the
genocidal tyrant references.
>>RELATED: Don’t count on James Murdoch
reading your email.
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Jeff Sonderman
Feb. 8, 2012
9:03 am
When you count the number of Americans who visit political news websites each month, as comScore does, you see that The Huffington Post's politics site is the No. 1 most trafficked.
But when
Pew Research Center pollsters called a sample of over 1,500 U.S. adults in January,
hardly any cited HuffPost as a source they "turn to" for campaign news online. (See comparison table below.)
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Steve Myers
Feb. 2, 2012
12:23 pm
The Huffington Post
A year after
AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million, Arianna Huffington has released figures showing how the site has performed in the last year. Monthly unique visits were at 36.2 million in December, an increase of 47 percent from a year earlier. Other figures:
- Comments in the last month: 6 million
- Comments on a single day: 253,331 (Jan 25, 2012)
- New commenters signing up per day: 5,500
- Social referrals in a month: 21.6 million (December 2011)
- Facebook referrals in a day: 1.4 million (January 4, 2012)
Huffington also announced the HuffPost Streaming Network, which "will live-stream 12 hours of original programming, 5 days a week, and repeating overnight. This will increase to 16 hours a day of original live programming by the end of 2013."
The network will be built around segments spotlighting the biggest, hottest, most engaging stories HuffPost is covering at any given moment and using them as the jumping-off points for conversations, commentary, and comedy. These segments will be as long -- or as short -- as they need to be. We won't be limited by the usual time constraints of TV. (more...)
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