- Huffington Post goes local (and the press doesn�t like it)
I remember when the HuffingtonPost launched in 2004. I was working at Wired and we looked at the home page with an article from John Cusak and laughed. We all thought “who the f*ck cares what John Cusak is writing.” The consensus – this won’t last.
Sure enough four years later John Cusak is writing articles for the local Chicago version of the HuffPost.
Should newspapers be afraid? Yes. Should readers? No neccesarily. I think the HuffPost can evolve and really become the paper of the future.
Should citizen journalism organizations in Chicago (WindyCitizen.com or Chi Town Daily) be afraid. Hell yea.
I don’t really want to defend the larger newspapers – but I do think that if this experiment works and moves to other cities – we might start seeing a reverse of citizen journalism: From small independent organizations to… Open Salons (open.salon.com), HuffingtonPosts and I’m sure Slate will follow. That doesn’t solve the old media problem – it might just bring it to a new platform.