Digital News Journalist

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post

In her 13-minute commencement address to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Class of 2009, Arianna Huffington, the outspoken editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, told the graduates that the eternal truths of journalism, including the need to speak truth to power, remain as important in the era of Twitter and Facebook as at any time in the past.

“Still, now, there is nothing that is as exciting as reading a well-turned phrase that combines storytelling, drama and, indeed, puts the apostrophes in the right places,” she said. “These are the eternal truths of journalism no matter how much technology changes and the world around us changes.”

Yet it seems to be a contemporary truth of journalism that new media types will chastise old or mainstream media types – and vice-versa – whenever a good opportunity arises.

Huffington warned the graduates not to fall into the trap of access. Too often mainstream media allows itself to be used as little more than ‘stenographers to power,’ she said. The seductive nature of access and proximity to power are why mainstream media outlets missed the two biggest stories of this decade: the lead up to the war in Iraq and the economic meltdown.

She also presented some interesting figures compiled by Karl Fisch, the Arapahoe High School administrator in Littleton, Colorado, behind ‘Shift Happens’ and the ‘Did You Know?’ series of videos. Here are a few examples:

• More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than could have been aired by ABC, CBS and NBC every minute of every day since 1948.
• Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years while unique readership of online news is up 34 million in the last five years.
• We send more text messages a day than there are people on the planet.

Journalism needs to be reinvented, she said.  To do that journalists today need to confront the professional world as it is, not as it was or as they’d like it to be.

“This is an amazing moment to be entering journalism,” she said in closing. “You are in a unique position to transform not just journalism but our world that desperately needs transforming.”

Watch the video:

Arianna Huffington – Commencement 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.