MONTREAL – Telling Montreal journalists her media company is “progressive,” Arianna Huffington defended her business model of not paying bloggers Wednesday at the launch of her new French-language Quebec site.
Controversy over the issue had led to the defections since Christmas of a dozen prominent left-wing Quebec bloggers who’d been courted for the launch, but it’s “nothing more than a storm in a teacup,” Huffington said.
“I know that we all like controversy,” the Greek-American founder of The Huffington Post told a dozen media and business reporters invited to meet her at an Old Montreal hotel. “But there’s nothing there.”
HuffPost offers bloggers a platform to reach more readers, and that doesn’t come with a paycheque, Huffington said at the morning meeting, part of a round of 23 interviews she gave here Wednesday to promote the launch.
“I did five interviews (so far) today and I wasn’t paid for any of them,” she noted. “That was the exchange. They got content for free, I got a platform for free. That was really the exchange.”
She said critics should think of HuffPost more as “a smorgasbord” or “a buffet table” of content, and treat the website as “a kind of account” like Twitter or Facebook, which also don’t pay for content.
Asked about using bloggers with links to outside interests in business and politics, not just individuals speaking for themselves, Huffington denied there’s any credibility gap – not even for bloggers paid by political parties or PR firms to write.
“We hope that people who come and blog are paid by someone,” she said. “Otherwise they’d have a hard time making a living. All that matters is transparency.”
Accuracy is key, she added. Any blogger getting the facts wrong, however, will have 24 hours to correct the error or have their password removed.
Seated next to her, parent company AOL Canada Inc.’s general manager said HuffPost Québec is targeting the same kind of rich and literate audience as the company’s Toronto-based English language site, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca, which launched last May.
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“Advertisers love an engaged audience, and we have an incredibly affluent audience that’s incredibly engaged with the conversation that’s happening on the platform,” said Graham Moysey, who used to work for the now-defunct Canwest media company, which used to own The Gazette.
“That translates directly into what media companies are really interested in, which is obviously the dollars at the end of the day from the perspective of being able to sell out that inventory,” said Moysey, who added he’d like to see other Canadian HuffPosts, notably in B.C. and Alberta.
In the U.S., the value of that “inventory” is now the subject of a $105 million lawsuit by one of HuffPost’s bloggers on behalf of the site’s more than 9,000 other bloggers, who want a chunk of the pie Huffington got when she sold her company to AOL a year ago for $315 million.
The bloggers HuffPost Québec has lined up include: Haitian President Michel Martelly, radio host Anne Marie Withenshaw, documentary filmmaker Francine Pelletier, the David Suzuki Foundation’s Quebec director Karel Mayrand, actor Sébastien Dhavernas, UQÀM professor Louis Balthazar, and MNAs Fatima Houda-Pepin and Yves-François Blanchet.
Local articles Wednesday included an analysis of census data, a story on Quebec casinos using facial recognition technology to discourage compulsive gamblers, a multimedia look at the Canadian army base in Valcartier, a live report on Montreal Fashion Week, a look at Quebec films that will screen at the Berlin Film Festival, and coverage of Tuesday night’s Canadiens-Penguins game.
Like the company’s other sites – in the U.S., Canada and France – a lot of Huff Post Québec’s content will not be original, but will instead consist of aggregated news, hyperlinks to what Huffington called “our so-called competitors” such as The Gazette, along only a single sentence describing the story.
As well, there will be articles lifted directly from the Le Monde, the site’s partner in France – five or six article a day, articles about the upcoming French presidential campaign, for example.
And even though there’s already a site for the rest of Canada, there’ll be “nothing provincial” about the new Quebec website, Huffington said in a blogpost Wednesday morning before her meeting with the journalists.
Noting that Canada now has two versions of HuffPost – the first time the company has double-up in the same country – Huffington said they’ll complement each other.
“It won’t be a sibling rivalry; it will be a powerful collaboration, a reflection of our commitment to being the hub of reporting, comprehensive curation, group blogging and engagement across all of Canada,” she wrote.
Le Huffington Post Quebec “will encompass all things Quebec and be run by a strong locally based editorial team with deep personal and professional roots in the province,” she wrote.
HuffPost Québec’s staff of four editors is led by managing editor Patrick White, who has also hired three online editors to help run the Montreal-based operation.
“We’ll cover everything that makes Quebec unique, from its French-speaking heritage and stunning architecture to its politics and vibrant entertainment scene,” Huffington wrote.
In her post, she downplayed a couple of things: the word “province,” which she recently used repeatedly in a Gazette interview to describe Quebec, and the defection of bloggers before the launch.
Earlier in the morning, an article posted to HuffPost’s English website called reporting of the controversy a “rehash” of an “old debate” over unpaid blogging at Huff Post.
“We respect the decisions of those who have declined, but we have a strong team of bloggers from Quebec and we look forward to engaging conversations with Quebecers,” White said in the article.
In her blogpost, Huffington said the new Quebec site will target Quebec’s moribund job market and controversies over crumbling infrastructure, like the Champlain Bridge.
“In the last three months of 2011, Quebec lost nearly 70,000 jobs, a loss estimated to be the province’s worst in nearly three decades,” Huffington wrote.
But she exaggerated a couple of things wrong.
She said, “last summer, a concrete expressway collapsed,” when it was concrete paralumes over a section of the Ville Marie Expressway that fell in.
And she said the Champlain Bridge “has worried Quebecers for years,” not months.
Similarly, despite months of preparation, there was a rushed quality to the HuffPost’s own reporting of the launch.
For example, the English article quoted White thus: “We hope this site … will open the a (sic) window to a new world.”
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