How the Huffpo Killed Cinematical

“How does it feel to have all that power?”

I read with great interest this Eric Snider piece on the demise of the house that Cinematical built with equal parts interest and disgust. As someone who has been online since 1999, and watched many sites come and go, the shift from html to blog, and now the swallowing up of little sites by bigger sites, I was shocked to see something as valuable having well known, well connected, informative writers downgraded to “unprofessional” writers who are expected to continue writing for the exposure of it.

The model of writing for links and exposure is a good one, just not in this case, not when millions are being spread around like a virus. ¬†Did they really think they could shift the staff at Cinematical so dramatically and no one notice? ¬†Have they never heard of Twitter? ¬†Don’t they know that it is the writers — those names we have come to know and trust – that drive us to Cinematical, not necessarily the name of the site alone?

The Huffington Post was a beautiful thing. ¬†But they ruined it because they got greedy. It wasn’t enough that they beat the Drudge Report to become the most trafficked online news aggregator – quite a feat in and of itself – and it wasn’t enough that they then sought even more traffic by pumping the web with boob shots, gossip, tabloid-level journalism — and it still wasn’t enough that they WERE far-reaching, widely read, incredibly successful. No, it wasn’t enough. ¬†Still not enough. ¬†It’s like the lawnmower man in that Stephen King short story — it had to swerve and eat the mole too.

When the HUFFPO monster started chewing into well established sites like Cinematical and telling all of those well-connected, well-known, well-respected bloggers that they were to be demoted and expected to work for free while Arianna and her team ushered a more “experienced” “staff” of “professional” writers who were supposed to know how to write about movies better? They went too far.

Don’t they know WHY people ever read Cinematical to begin with? ¬†How dumb do you have to be? ¬†Dumb is the wrong word: shortsighted, arrogant – those are better words.

It reminds me of that scene at the end of ET where Elliot and his family have been taking pretty good care of ET. When the “professionals” swoop in to try to handle him in a generic, sanitized, institutionalized way they very nearly kill him. There is something to be said for writers who know their audiences, who have a relationship with them, who have thousands of Twitter followers already — readership trust is a difficult thing to build and I’m telling you, that is what blog traffic is all about.

You don’t buy a site like Cinematical without giving credit to very people who made it what it was. That is like using dollar bills to wipe your ass.

It doesn’t matter, you might say. What is one dissolving fresh water sea into an ocean of salt water? I myself have stopped following the Huffington Post and try whenever possible not to link to them. I used to respect Arianna Huffington for being such a strong leader and web pioneer. But I see she is vulnerable to the same trappings as any large corporation – she won’t be satisfied until she ruined every great blog out there. And what a shame that is.

In Snider’s piece about the debacle, he quotes a statement released by the Huffington Post:

The AOL/Huffington people issued this statement:

The Huffington Post Media Group has provided freelancers with as much clarity as possible about our intention to build a great team of full-time editors, writers, and reporters, and we regret that [the] email misrepresents these efforts. In fact, we have been very forthcoming and transparent in our communication with freelancers through multiple calls and emails [note: that is not true] and have encouraged freelancers to apply for full-time positions. But we never asked freelancers to become unpaid bloggers — that is not how our group blog works. Our bloggers, many of whom are not professional writers, post on the HuffPost platform to expose their views to a wide audience, and to raise their profiles.

You’ll have to read the whole saga to find out what happened next — editors fired, emails flying around, a beast with its head cut off still writhing in the dirt.

No, this was a huge miscalculation and PR nightmare on the part of the Huffington Post — don’t they pride themselves in knowing what the ground-up internet is doing? Oh, I know. Let’s buy Boing Boing and fire Cory Doctorow! ¬†To me this shows a business owner who does not see the forest for the trees: she and her team forgot what made Cinematical the brand it became: the writers. ¬†I suppose they suspected that the writers would just sit down and shut up. I’m glad they didn’t. It is always better to make noise.

Snider closes his piece this way:

Not that you were going to, but don’t worry about me. I have my eggs in a few other baskets, notably Film.com, whose basket is large and accommodating and not currently in danger of being restructured by Greek pirates. Financially speaking, the death of Cinematical won’t be a huge blow to me.

But it’s a big loss in other ways, for me and for the online film community. Cinematical was a quality site. They ran a wide variety of features covering every aspect of the movies, all produced by a couple dozen enthusiastic writers with distinct voices. Even if Huffington keeps it going with full-time staffers, it’s highly unlikely it’s going to have anything close to that level of passion and zeal. Part of what made the job rewarding is that it was more than just a job. It was something we genuinely enjoyed. We love writing about movies so much that if we didn’t have bills to pay, then yes: we’d do it for free.

And that love for the work, my friends, is what makes all the difference at a time when movie sites are a dime a dozen. Can the Huffington Post empire bring the lemmings and the eyeballs? Magic Eight Ball says, yes they can – they always do. But they will have lost something vital while doing so: the soul of the thing.

If they are happy with that, have at it.