The Huffington Post launched a spankin’ new section Monday called HuffPost College, inspired by founder Arianna Huffington’s travels to campuses nationwide that reminded her of “all the excitement, promise, passion, intellectual curiosity, and vitality of college life.”
In other words, HuffPost College is not the world of drunken debauchery and one night stands that we know here in College Park, but instead a feature fed by over 60 college newspapers and student contributors from across the country.
In case you were wondering, The Diamondback declined to be a part of the new section.
Huffington has been widely criticized for killing newspapers, a charge she flatly denies. Critics claim she just aims to maximize her exposure and uses as much free material as possible by emphasizing citizen journalism, unpaid bloggers (often her celebrity friends: if you’ve ever wondered what John Cusack thinks of health care reform, you’ve found your site) and by linking to other papers’ original reporting instead of conducting its own.
But in a hilariously ironic twist, the first major item was called “Majoring in Debt” and featured essays from nine college students who collectively owe $816,897 in tuition, and who weren’t paid for their contributions to the site.
The success of the section remains to be seen, although the Huffington Post boasts more readers than the New York Times website with over 20 million unique hits a month.
However, we look forward to stealing ideas from it for blog posts in the coming days and weeks. It’s called payback, Arianna.