As someone whose career has focused on thought leadership
and reputation management, the shuttering of HuffPost U.S.’s unpaid blogger
platform feels like a pretty significant blow to personal digital marketing.
The draw of being a HuffPost contributor for my clients (Fortune
500 executives, industry leaders) was the publication’s impressive reach and the
credibility publishing under the HuffPost masthead lent their opinions. Everyone wanted their own (legitimate) channel
to build a bigger profile and demonstrate their intelligence, and HuffPost – and
the way it dovetailed media and marketing – afforded many the opportunity.
Interestingly, it’s for these exact reasons that HuffPost
says it’s shutting the platform down – there’s too much “news” out in the world
today and too many places for people to preach their opinions for free on the
internet, and it has become dangerous. HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen
explained, “Open platforms that once seemed radically democratizing now
threaten, with the tsunami of false information we all face daily, to undermine
democracy. When everyone has a megaphone, no one can be heard.”
In lieu of its 100,000-strong unpaid blogger network in the
U.S., HuffPost is launching two new paid contributor sections – Opinion, which will publish content from
regular columnists and one-off guest writers vetted/commissioned by HuffPost’s
Opinion editors – and Personal,
featuring first-person essays by guest writers and features, Q&A and interviews
by HuffPost reporters “exploring the experiences and lives of celebrities,
newsmakers and ‘everyday’ individuals.” It appears that HuffPost is not only raising
its standards for content, but also putting reporting back in the hands of
reporters.
It’s an interesting decision. The TechCrunch article questions whether HuffPost’s move will trigger
similar reactions by publications like Forbes,
which also hosts a significant amount of contributor/branded content online. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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