/// Arianna Huffington To Bill Keller: Who You Calling "Oxpecker"? [MediaMemo]

Earlier today Bill Keller hurled some invective against Web aggregators in general and Arianna Huffington in particular. It’s a great, punchy read !  But if you’re in a hurry: The New York Times’ executive editor calls media commentators and media recyclers “ oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks.” He compares aggregators to pirates, then says that AOL’s $315 million purchase of Huffington Post has been poorly described: “Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.” He says that Huffington herself “aggregated” his own words and passed them off as her own. Here’s Huffington’s response, which she’s going to post on her own site shortly: Bill Keller Accuses Me of “Aggregating” an Idea He Had Actually “Aggregated” From Me Perhaps unsettled by the fact that, when combined, The Huffington Post and AOL News have over 70 percent more unique visitors than the New York Times , and that HuffPost/AOL News’ combined page views in January 2011 were double the page views of the Times (1.5 billion vs. 750 million), New York Times executive editor Bill Keller decided to unleash an exceptionally misinformed attack on HuffPost in a column released today and slated for this weekend’s NYT Magazine . After opening his piece by patting himself on the back so hard I’d be surprised if he didn’t crack a rib (it seems everyone — even Woody Allen and those folks on Twitter — think he’s super “powerful” and “influential”!), Keller turned to the putative subject of his column: “the ‘American Idol’-ization of news” and the evils of “aggregation.” Hearkening back to the glory years when Rupert Murdoch and his minions labeled sites that aggregate the news “ parasites ,” “ content kleptomaniacs ,” “ vampires ,” and “ tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internets ” (the news industry equivalent of “your mama wears army boots!” although, not quite as persuasive), Keller says of aggregation: “In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediashpere, it is a respected business model.” He then describes HuffPost’s offerings as nothing more than “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications.” I wonder what site he’s been looking at. Not ours, as even a casual look at HuffPost will show. Even before we merged with AOL, HuffPost had 148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism. As long ago as 2009, Frank Rich praised the work of our reporters in his column. Paul Krugman more recently singled out the work of our lead finance writer. Columbia Journalism Review has credited our work for advancing the public’s understanding of the national foreclosure crisis, and a pair of our Washington reporters recently received a major journalism prize. Matthew Yglesias , Felix Salmon , Catherine Rempell , are among the many others have cited the work of our reporters. Did Keller not notice that?

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Arianna Huffington To Bill Keller: Who You Calling "Oxpecker"? [MediaMemo]