How Adrianna Huffington Would Compete with Online Media

How Adrianna Huffington Would Compete with Online Media. Female: I wanted to know when you started the Huffington Post. I don't know if you ever dreamed that you would be put essentially in direct competition with some of these mainstream traditional news sources such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And I'm wondering essentially now, if you feel that the Huffington Post can be collaborative with them or if it's always going to be directly competitive and also essentially if what you would do if you were at the helm of one of these traditional online news media sources? What you would do to compete with the Huffington Post and distinguish themselves from that. Male: you’re Pinch Sulzberger what do you do? Female 2: Well first of all. Male: because I imagine you don't want to be Rooper so— Female 2: Well you know I don't see this we don't wake up every day at the Huffington Post and think of us as competing and obviously we're delighted when we get our com score numbers and we're ahead as we are right now the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and the New York Times remains ahead of us, but we are kind of following our own drama. You know we are not looking at what are they doing? What are we doing? And if they make the mistake of going behind pay walls or using metering that will be like the worst thing they can do from a business perspective because for news and opinion journalism that is really not a motor that you can return to you know the famous Greek Philosopher Heraclitus said you cannot enter into the same river twice and they're trying to enter into that river again and that for me is really incomprehensible. So, if they do that I think they will be making a big mistake and it will make it easier for online media like the Huffington Post to go to get further ahead because right now unless you're very specialized content like very specialized financial content that helps people invest and make decisions like that, we're living in a linked economy and so we welcome this collaborations and if you look at the Huffington Post linking to New York Times to other mainstream publications we drive a lot of traffic to them and that's traffic that they can monetize. In the same way, when we link to MSNBC and we have their embeddable player on the side and they can sell advertising on their embeddable player, you know they can monetize their traffic you know it's like that's the new world we live in, it's like it's a very promiscuous world and promiscuity might not be good in relationships but it's good in new media. You know it's like you take your content and you put it everywhere. Male: Not long ago the New York Times did put its star columnists like Tom Freidman and Marine Doud and Paul Krugman behind the paid wall— Female 2: Times select. Male: Times Select and they learned that nobody came. Female 2: Right and the columnists hated it. Male: Because they were no longer in the national discussion, they were out of the national discussion.