Hunffington Posts review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Hunffington Posts review - Essay Example This was a bit of a bold move considering the outcome AOL’s previous merger with Time Warner, which ended in disaster. It is not difficult to understand the reasons for it. AOL gets access to all of the HuffPost’s readers (i.e. customers) to sell its other products to and HuffPost gets the opportunity to be part of a major new media company. In the context of the newspaper industry, I feel that this merger has both a positive and a negative aspect. As a member of the ‘internet’ generation, I like to see innovation and change. The internet has truly democratized the exchange of information in a way that the printing press or the telephone could not, despite their historically meaningful contribution to the same. If AOL and HuffPost can become sustainably profitable, the new company will provide a model for what journalism and journalists need to do in the future in order to not only survive but actually thrive. That of course brings me to the negative side of the merger. The merger has occurred in an environment which has witnessed the near collapse of the newspaper industry (and the homologous printed book industry). As an avid reader of both books and newspapers, I do not find great pleasure in their disappearance. The printed word has been at the center of human cultural growth over the last few centuries . Personally I love the smell of old books and a freshly printed newspaper. That smell brings up memories of rainy afternoons spent devouring books and mornings spent watching my father read the paper before going to work. The idea that Kindles and websites will replace all that is displeasing and even frightening. You can touch paper. You cannot touch a computer-generated image. The Dewey-Lippman debate in some ways presaged the 21st evolution of the news media. Lippman once said that the â€Å"average American [reader]† is similar to the â€Å"deaf spectator in the back row† in that â€Å"[h]e does not