NY Times editor moans about HuffPost—Arianna’s having none of it

Not sure the Times wants to pick this fight. It might have more credibility than HuffPost, but HuffPost combined with Aol now has more (online) readers.

Or maybe that’s why he picked a fight. The whole thing might be a giant PR stunt for the Times.

In a piece for this week’s New York Times Magazine, Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, confronts the issue of news aggregation. He doesn’t blast it entirely, though he does take aim at Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post.

[Aggregating the news] too often … amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site, and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.

Ironic that I just aggregated that?

He continues, calling Huffington the “queen of aggregation.” She has “discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers.”