Showing posts with label Super Bowl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Super Bowl. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Monday, February 07, 2011
Arianna Huffington: When HuffPost Met AOL: "A Merger of Visions"
Image via CrunchBaseArianna Huffington: When HuffPost Met AOL: "A Merger of Visions"I've used this space to make all sorts of important HuffPost announcements: new sections, new additions to the HuffPost team, new HuffPost features and new apps. But none of them can hold a candle to what we are announcing today.
When Kenny Lerer and I launched The Huffington Post on May 9, 2005, we would have been hard-pressed to imagine this moment. The Huffington Post has already been growing at a prodigious rate. But my New Year's resolution for 2011 was to take HuffPost to the next level -- not just incrementally, but exponentially. With the help of our CEO, Eric Hippeau, and our president and head of sales, Greg Coleman, we'd been able to make the site profitable. Now was the time to take leaps.
At the first meeting of our senior team this year, I laid out the five areas on which I wanted us to double down: major expansion of local sections; the launch of international Huffington Post sections (beginning with HuffPost Brazil); more emphasis on the growing importance of service and giving back in our lives; much more original video; and additional sections that would fill in some of the gaps in what we are offering our readers, including cars, music, games, and underserved minority communities.
Around the same time, I got an email from Tim Armstrong (AOL Chairman and CEO), saying he had something he wanted to discuss with me, and asking when we could meet. We arranged to have lunch at my home in LA later that week. The day before the lunch, Tim emailed and asked if it would be okay if he brought Artie Minson, AOL's CFO, with him. I told him of course and asked if there was anything they didn't eat. "I'll eat anything but mushrooms," he said.
The next day, he and Artie arrived, and, before the first course was served -- with an energy and enthusiasm I'd soon come to know is his default operating position -- Tim said he wanted to buy The Huffington Post and put all of AOL's content under a newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, with me as its president and editor-in-chief.
I flashed back to November 10, 2010. That was the day that I heard Tim speak at the Quadrangle conference in New York. He was part of a panel on "Digital Darwinism," along with Michael Eisner and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
At some point during the discussion, while Tim was talking about his plans for turning AOL around, he said that the challenge lay in the fact that AOL had off-the-charts brand awareness, and off-the-charts user trust and loyalty, but almost no brand identity. I was immediately struck by his clear-eyed assessment of his company's strengths and weaknesses, and his willingness to be so up front about them.
As HuffPost grew, Kenny and I had both been obsessed with what professor Clayton Christensen has famously called "the innovator's dilemma." In his book of the same name, Christensen explains how even very successful companies, with very capable personnel, often fail because they tend to stick too closely to the strategies that made them successful in the first place, leaving them vulnerable to changing conditions and new realities. They miss major opportunities because they are unwilling to disrupt their own game.
After that November panel, Tim and I chatted briefly and arranged to see each other the next day. At that meeting, we talked not just about what our two companies were doing, but about the larger trends we saw happening online and in our world. I laid out my vision for the expansion of The Huffington Post, and he laid out his vision for AOL. We were practically finishing each other's sentences.
Two months later, we were having lunch in LA and Tim was demonstrating that he got the Innovator's Dilemma and was willing to disrupt the present to, if I may borrow a phrase, "win the future." (I guess that makes this AOL's -- and HuffPost's -- Sputnik Moment!)
There were many more meetings, back-and-forth emails, and phone calls about what our merger would mean for the two companies. Things moved very quickly. A term sheet was produced, due diligence began, and on Super Bowl Sunday the deal was signed. In fact, it was actually signed at the Super Bowl, where Tim was hosting a group of wounded vets from the Screamin' Eagles. It was my first Super Bowl -- an incredibly exciting backdrop that mirrored my excitement about the merger and the future ahead.
By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.
Remember my New Year's resolution? It's coming true -- and it's only the beginning of February. Let's go down the checklist: Local? AOL's Patch.com covers 800 towns across America, providing an incredible infrastructure for citizen journalism in time for the 2012 election, and a focus on community and local solutions that have been an integral part of HuffPost's DNA. Check.
Original video? AOL's just finished building a pair of state-of-the-art video studios in New York and LA, and video views on AOL have gone up 400 percent over the last year. Check. More sections? AutoBlog, Music, AOL Latino, Black Voices, etc, etc, etc. fill gaps in HuffPost's coverage. Add all that to what HuffPost is doing with social, community, mobile, as well as our commitment to innovative original reporting and beyond-left-and-right commentary, and the blending will have a multiplier effect. Or, as Tim and I have been saying over the last couple of weeks: 1 + 1 = 11.
Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.
I am deeply grateful first of all to Kenny, whose insights and vision were instrumental to what we created together, and who will continue to give me advice and wisdom in the years to come. This deal would also not have been possible without Eric Hippeau, who together with Greg Coleman and his great sales team, monetized what HuffPost had created. Thank you to our truly amazing tech team, led by our CTO Paul Berry, and our passionate and gifted editorial team, led by our editor Roy Sekoff, who has been there since before Day One, and our managing editor Jai Singh. Their great work can now continue on a much bigger platform. And, of course, thank you to our HuffPost community, whose engagement, enthusiasm, loyalty, and support have been the foundation of HuffPost's growth.
We can't wait to begin the ride.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Bill O’Reilly interview of Barack Obama could be victory for both - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.com
Image via WikipediaBill O’Reilly interview of Barack Obama could be victory for both - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.comBy: Keach Hagey
February 6, 2011 07:39 AM EST
With a classic showman’s swagger, Bill O’Reilly has declared that more people will see his live pre-game interview with President Barack Obama on Sunday than “any other interview that’s ever been done in the history of mankind.”
He may well be right. Last year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched television broadcast ever, drawing 106 million viewers. This year, the game happens to fall in the middle of the greatest foreign policy crisis of Obama’s presidency, following a week of complaints from the White House press corps about a lack of access to the president to ask about Egypt.
And most important, for those keeping score in the political media game, it will be the first time Obama sits down as president with the highest-rated host of the cable network he once called “entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more bitter rivalry in the NFL. And no one expects one interview to change that.
But there are a variety of factors that make the interview a possible win-win for Obama and Fox. The sheer size of the Super Bowl audience, O’Reilly’s history of giving the president a fair shake when he interviewed him as a candidate and the opportunity for Obama to look like a stand-up guy for stepping into the ring with a highly visible and highly vocal critic.
“I think it’s a very smart idea for both Obama and O’Reilly to do the interview before the Super Bowl,” said Jane Hall, a former Fox News analyst and associate professor at American University’s School of Communication. “In the 2008 campaign, he did a terrific, serious, lively interview with Barack Obama that probably helped Obama with Republican voters.”
Considering the rocky past with Fox, it may seem strange that the White House would have agreed to the interview at all. Obama’s not in the habit of doing sit-downs with opinionated cable hosts. He hasn’t done one yet as president with the primetime hosts of the more ideologically aligned, though lower-rated, MSNBC, though he did sit down with Jon Stewart last fall.
Truth is, it wouldn’t have been easy for Obama to decline. There’s a recent tradition that the network that broadcasts the Super Bowl also gets to have one of its top personalities interview the president. Saying no to O’Reilly — especially after Obama sat down with CBS’s Katie Couric last year — would have touched off a whole new Obama vs. Fox story line, right at the moment Obama is trying to recapture his campaign persona as a bipartisan healer.
Still, the White House — which, like Fox News, did not respond to requests for comment for this article — is getting surprisingly little criticism from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, which is usually quick to criticize Fox News.
O’Reilly, meanwhile, is bracing for criticism from the left and the right for his 14-minute live interview Sunday, which will air on local Fox stations.
“I fully expect to get hammered after the interview is over,” he wrote in his column this week. “Depending on how you feel about the president, the questions will either be too soft or too intrusive.”
His previous interview with Obama was able to be a “spirited back and forth,” he said, in part because Obama was a senator. When interviewing the president, “there is strict protocol” and “if I interrupt him too much, I look like a dope.”
That interview in September 2008, took a long time for O’Reilly to land. Three months before it, then-Sen. Obama met with News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to air his concerns about whether Fox News was going to give him a “fair shake,” Ailes told Howard Kurtz. Until then, Obama had resisted going on Fox for months, but he left the meeting agreeing to an interview with O’Reilly before the election.
The interview was civil, even collegial at times, though not without interruptions from O’Reilly. He alternated between praising the candidate’s “good speech” and pointing out points of policy agreement between them, to saying Obama was “desperately wrong on the [Iraq] surge.”
That interview, though tough, stands in contrast to Bret Baier’s interview with Obama as president last March in the midst of the health care battle, which was so filled with interruptions that Baier apologized for it at the end, saying he was just trying to “get the most for our buck.”
Baier’s interview came six months after the Obama administration basically declared war on Fox News. The war began in October 2009, when Anita Dunn, then the White House’s communications director, called Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news” in an interview. David Axelrod, then the president’s senior adviser, asked other news organizations to join the administration in declaring that Fox was “not really a news station.” Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”
With Axelrod departing the White House last month, none of these voices leading the attack on Fox is in the White House any longer.
“Having declared Fox not a news network didn’t work,” Hall said. “It was not a winning idea.”
The war didn’t last long. By November 2009, Obama had granted an interview to Major Garrett, then Fox News’s White House correspondent, in Beijing.
Although Fox’s primetime hosts remain critical of the president’s policies, particularly on health care, there have been signs of further thawing recently.
Following the president’s speech after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Chris Wallace participated in a Fox News panel, all giving positive marks. Hume said it was “precisely what the people of this region needed and wanted,” while Wallace called it a “very powerful speech.” Krauthammer said it was delivered in a “very skillfully, successful way.”
The praise caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who accused the Fox panel of “slobbering” over the speech because it was “all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.”
That’s not to say that things can’t still be quite adversarial between Obama and Fox News. Fox has been emphasizing coverage of the lawsuit striking down the health care law for the past week. Also last week, Axelrod, signaling the kind of messaging that may be coming from the president’s Chicago reelection headquarters, responded to a question about the 2012 Republican field of candidates by saying they were “all Fox News personalities.”
Five potential candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination are Fox News contributors: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and John Bolton.
Axelrod attempted to use Palin’s and Huckabee’s Fox contracts against them in sizing them up as competition, POLITICO reported.
“She’s an interesting person,” he said of Palin. “I know she has a robust broadcast career at Fox. And I don’t know if she’s going to want to give that up. The same with Gov. Huckabee. He’s a very formidable person, very genial person, someone I personally like.” But, he added, “they have a great platform right now, and I don’t know whether they’re going to want to give that up.”
Hall, who appeared regularly on O’Reilly’s program until she quit Fox News over what she considered to be over-the-top rhetoric by Glenn Beck, cautioned against conflating Fox News and O’Reilly too much.
“[O’Reilly] considers himself and talks about himself as an independent,” she said. “I would say, compared to Sean Hannity, he is a person who does not always say what you think is going to be the predictable line from Fox News’s conservative hosts.”
This independence has sometimes cost O’Reilly. In the wake of the Tucson shootings, he complained on his show that he wasn’t able to book Palin, despite having defended her in his “Talking Points Memo” on his first day back on the air, and despite her being on his employer’s payroll. He had done some of the former Alaskan governor’s toughest interviews last summer. She went on “Hannity” a week later.
From the left, the loudest critique of Obama’s Super Bowl sit-down came from former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who delivered a “Special Comment” the night of the Tucson shooting, decrying violent rhetoric and calling on several Fox News personalities to apologize for their use of it in the past.
“If Glenn Beck, who obsessed about gold and debt and who joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O’Reilly who said, ‘Tiller the Killer,’ until it was burned into the minds of their viewers, if they do not begin their broadcasts with an apology, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by viewers and listeners, by all politicans who appear on their programs, including President Obama and his interview with Fox on Super Bowl Sunday and by the networks that employ them,” he said.
“If they are not responsible for what happened in Tucson, they must be held responsible for doing what they can to make certain Tucson does not happen again.”
Fox’s Ailes did give an interview the following week, saying he had told his personalities to “tone it down,” adding that he hoped “the other side does that” too.
But even Robert Greenwald, who made the highly critical documentary, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” about Fox News in 2004 and sees himself as having passed the Fox-critiquing torch on to liberal organizations like Media Matters, understands why the president is doing the interview, even if he doesn’t approve.
“It’s an effort to reach the largest possible audience, which will be more than a Fox audience at that particular time. So I understand the tactic in terms of wanting to reach that audience,” Greenwald said. “If I were president, I wouldn’t make that decision. It’s looking for a short-term ability to reach some more eyeballs, but it will cost them in the long term because it gives further credence and further support to Fox.”
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