Spats

Bill Keller Blasts Arianna Huffington

For aggregation, line-stealing.

First it was Fox News, now it's Arianna Huffington that New York Times editor Bill Keller is calling out. In this week's New York Times Magazine, Keller criticizes what he calls “the American-Idolization of news,” singling out Huffington as “the queen of aggregation,” who “discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.” Perhaps most incendiary, he accuses her of stealing—“aggregating” —a line of his from a panel on the future of journalism, though he doesn't say what the line is. This prompted a response from Huffington, who called Keller's piece “exceptionally misinformed” and “as lame as it is laughable.” Moreover, she says it was Keller who stole Huffington's words. Going back to transcripts of the panel, she says Keller stole her use of the term “convergence” to describe the way mainstream media was going online and online media was doing more reporting, asking, “So who was it, Bill, who was 'aggregating' someone else's ideas?”