The pleasant-looking lady above is named Betsy Morgan. Until 2009 she was CEO at the Huffington Post. A couple weeks ago she accepted a similar job for Glenn Beck’s online enterprise, The Blaze, perhaps equally well-appellated, The Flame.
Asked how she could make the about face from a left leaning pub to one that tilts 179 degrees opposite, Ms. Egan is quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I am a very apolitical person. I’m a business person, who is absolutely fascinated by brands.”
“Glenn has built for himself quite an enormous brand,” and the purpose of The Blaze is to “leverage the huge loyalty of that audience,” she told a Forbes blogger.
Uh huh. Brands used to be things like Coke, Raid, Kibbles and Bits. Enterprises whose logos contained Fraktur-fonted nouns like Post, Times, Gazette used to be known as newspapers. The former were launched to sell stuff of interest to the public. The later were expected (at least lip-servicedly) to serve the “public interest.”
Brands were about “lifestyle.” Papers were about lives. Brands were about showing off. Papers were about telling what. Brands were sold. Papers were edited.
Morgan’s job for Beck will be to “curate.” Dare I say: “How Brooklyn!”
Brand people talk a lot about “passion,” as do incendiary media types, and this includes Huffington as well as Beck. But passion no longer implies loyalty to a cause, it means to monetize. I don’t think “monetization” was a word in newspaper stylebooks until recently.
Execs jump from Coke to Pepsi, from Apple to Microsoft, without the slightest thought of loyalty. Why should I fault Ms. Morgan for doing what’s expedient, for playing both sides. (Ms. Huffington, herself in the monetization business, no doubt agrees.)
I need to get with the program, to realize there is no such thing as public interest anymore, just what excites passion or oh-c’mon-let’s-call-a-spade-a-spade, What Sells. Mary Matalin and James Carville set the stage for hypocro-politics two decades ago. Betsy Morgan no doubt admires them both.
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