Is HuffPost contributing to the demise of U.S. daily newspapers in any way?
Huffington: Absolutely not. From the first interview I gave even before we launched The Huffington Post, I made it clear that it wasn’t an either/or proposition — and that, in fact, there was a convergence happening between new and old media, and that the future would be a hybrid one. The problems the newspaper industry is going through are dramatic. But they would be no less dramatic if HuffPost did not exist. Our model has always been to point to the best content available on the Web and to drive as much traffic as possible to the sites providing that content, including newspaper sites. We want to attract traffic — but we also want to send it back out to as many sites as we can. It’s one of the things I love most about online news. It’s not a zero-sum game. IWM: Why doesn’t HuffPost pay most of the bloggers who are providing content for your site? Huffington: HuffPost pays its editors and its reporters. We don’t pay for opinion pieces but, then again, bloggers have no deadlines or
