When I walked into the convention room at the Rio, I was shocked and amazed to see Arianna Huffington, executive editor at the Huffington Post and keynote speaker at the conference, sitting right in the middle of the room chatting with a couple organizers. Here I was thinking I had to bust into some dressing room brandishing my iTalk, but there she was completely accessible. So, like a brave chicken little, I turned and ran away.
That’s ok, because Huffington provided enough quotes to last me a lifetime. Or, at least, an entire blog post.
Most of her comments were directed at the media, that is, the big players like CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times.
On MSNBC, Huffington said they are “blonds reporting on missing blonds.” Her criticism was that they spent more time on personal tragedy like missing persons than on “collective tragedy” like the thousands of troops in Iraq attempting suicide.
Huffington also stated that offering a right and left wing panelist as they do on all cable news channels is not getting at the truth of a story.
Huffington tempered her keynote speech with a lot of humor.
When talking about polls, she said she’s starting a “partnership for a poll free America.” She also talked about a section of her blog on pollstrology: it offers the latest polls plus all of the presidential candidates horoscopes (although it hasn’t been updated since January).
Most of all, she praised the blogosphere for beating out the media in actual reporting. While the media has ADD, she said, the blogosphere has OCD. Bloggers are obsessed about following-up with the story and seeing it through until its conclusion. Huffington cited the long forgotten coal mine collapse in Utah and its underreported investigation in Congress.
The lesson of the day wasn’t so much about using new technologies in journalism but to return to the roots of journalism. Or, what Huffington called, “ferreting out the truth.”
