Farhad Manjoo wrote an interesting piece about the newly-launched Huffington Post for Salon (said one of the people quoted in the article).
"One thing that works well with politically oriented sites is the sense of outrage: We gotta do something now!" says Ken Layne, a longtime blogger who now writes at the new Sploid, the Gawker Media tabloid-news blog that has fashioned itself after The Drudge Report, and therefore something of a competitor to Huffington's site. "On Daily Kos or WorldNetDaily there's this sense, 'Jesus Christ the world's ending now and we know whose fault it is!'" Layne concedes that, of course, reality is more complex than what you find on these sites, but he's got a point — when you read blogs you're looking for a unique, passionate voice. Judging from just the first day's dozens of posts, it's hard to discern a unique, passionate voice amid the cacophony presented by The Huffington Posts. Indeed, the site reads a bit too much like a dinner party, where opinions are offered gently, not foisted aggressively, and where some people just ramble. "You've got David Mamet talking about aren't computers great — what the fuck is that?" says Layne. "I couldn't even read that — I respect his writing too much to read it."
Huffington, for her part, describes her site's point of view in the way Bill Clinton used to talk about his politics — she's providing the Third Way, an information source different from the polarized debate that marks today's media culture. "The left-right way of looking at our world is obsolete and misleading," she says. "A lot of our issues are what I call '70-percent issues' — issues where I don't think there's any broad disagreement, things we can solve if we can learn to speak to each other, and that's one of the goals of the site." This middle-ground position is of a piece with Huffington's politics, but it can make for a blog that seems somewhat unfocused, and lacking verve. After all, does anyone go to a blog for a discussion of issues that most people agree on?
Huffington has also been criticized for her apparent belief that what the ailing American political culture needs now is more input from wealthy celebrities. "Do Americans really care what celebrities think about politics?" asks Glenn Reynolds, the law professor who runs the popular, right-leaning blog Instapundit. "People like to know who celebrities are sleeping with because they'd like to sleep with celebrities — but we don't want to talk to celebrities about current affairs."
Link to "When Celebrities Blog" (requires site subscription, or sit through a retarded Flash ad for free day pass).
Over at the LA Weekly, columnist Nikki Finke posts, er, bludgeons, a far less generous critique: Link.
