On writing:

Grammar Girl’s Tips for Effective Proofreading (Ragan.com) – Mignon Fogarty, aka G.G., confesses that she’s just as prone to typos as the next writer/blogger. Her remedies: have someone else read your work, or if you can’t, read copy backwards, out loud or in print – or my favorite – leave it alone for a while, then look at it with fresh eyes.

• Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More (The Atlantic)
• Top 10 Tips for a Successful Podcast Interview (Productive Writers)
• The Top 7 Reasons Why Publishers Reject Nonfiction Book Proposals (Working Writers)

On the writing business:

Reuters looking for local stringers (SPJ) – The international financial news wire service needs contract writers to carry out its plans to expand into U.S. state and local non-business news. According to the SPJ story, rates range from $25 to $50 for tips and quotes to $200 for covering breaking news.

Top Sites for Journalists (Scoop.It) – Somebody’s picks for best j-sites. According to what I could gather from the website, Scoop.It is a curation tool (not unlike Paper.li) meant to be used as an e-learning aid. From the looks of it, though, I’d say it’s got all kinds of journalistic possibilities. For example, this could be great way to show all the blogs entered in the 2011 WordCount Blogathon on one page – hmmm.

An Hour in a Room With Arianna Huffington Guest Starring Biz Stone (TechCrunch) – Reporters covering AdTech conference use 56 minutes of one-on-one time with the HuffPo founder and new head of editorial at AOL to talk about lawsuits, layoffs and the difference between bloggers and writers.

• Rolling Stone’s Will Dana on Long Form: ‘Quality Will Win Out in the End’ (Yahoo News)
• Sometimes, Just Writing the To-Do List is Enough (Amanda’s Wrinkled Pages)

We interrupt our regularly scheduled list of recommended reading for writers to bring you more reactions to AOL’s deal to buy Huffington Post for $315 million in cash and stock, a deal that would make Arianna Huffington the company’s new head of content.

There’s a lot of “what does this mean” posts about the deal floating around, but I’m focusing on those that pertain specifically to writers and bloggers.

They are:

The Politics of the New Huffington Post at AOL (Jay Rosen’s PressThink) – From the esteemed industry pundit and New York University journalism professor.

How The Huffington Post Really Works (In Case You Were Wondering) (HuffPo) – One friend and fellow journalist called this a “pompous, self-righteous, but still informative post.” Read and decide for yourself.

This week in review: AOL’s big HuffPost buy (Nieman Journalism Lab) – By far the most comprehensive list of what everyone is saying about the deal.

AOL-HuffPo: Arianna and the Free Blog Economy (PaidContent)

AOL (Heart) HuffPo. The Loser? Journalism (Los Angeles Times) – Tim Rutten op-ed and winner of the best quote about the deal to date:

The Huffington Post is a brilliantly packaged product with a particular flair for addressing the cultural and entertainment tastes of its overwhelmingly liberal audience. To grasp its business model, though, you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.

Guess who the slaves are? That’s right – you, me and anyone else who writes for HuffPo for free.

Flash forward to Sunday. While Aaron Rodgers was leading the Green Bay Packers to their fourth Super Bowl victory and I took a nap on my couch, Huffington was putting the finishing touches on her own victory, a deal to sell HuffPo to AOL for $315 million, $300 million of it in cold hard cash, and $15 million in stock.

That’s quite a profit on a website that Huffington started in 2005 with $1 million to $2 million (news stories on the deal have cited both figures) and that made a reported $31 million last year. According to New York magazine, Huffington’s share of the sale price could be as much as $100 million. Quite impressive for someone who, according to Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, was not well acquainted with blogging much before that. Calacanis, an Internet industry fixture since the days of Web 1.0,  met Huffington when she was still getting her blogging feet wet, he told the crowd at a Federated Media social-media conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “I was dating blogs and now I’m ready to go steady,” he remembers her telling him at the time.

She was a quick study. In the years since, HuffPo has evolved from what many thought would be the left-leaning Huffington’s answer to The Drudge Report to one of the most heavily-visited news sites today, drawing 25 million visitors a month. (Read more about Huffington in this profile of her that The New Yorker ran in 2008.)

Lost in the coverage of the deal so far is where it leaves the phalanx of writers and bloggers that both AOL and HuffPo rely on to produce the words, pictures, video, links and other content that gets people to their respective sites.

What’s in it for them?

Will HuffPo, which has amassed a paid staff of 100 but still depends on mostly unpaid bloggers, take a cue from AOL and start paying for posts? Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, hopes so. Writing on his Mediactive blog, he says:

I’m hoping that Huffington will recognize how this looks and then do the right thing: namely, cut a bunch of checks to a bunch of the most productive contributors on whose work she’s built a significant part of her new fortune. They’ve earned some of the spoils. I think Huffington is smart enough to know not just the PR value of doing this. And, and feel free to call me naive for saying this, I also think she’s wise enough to know why she should do it on more ethical grounds, too.

Or will AOL, which uses an in-house editorial staff and freelancers galore, adopt the HuffPo model, relying on more unpaid citizen journalists plus authors, filmmakers, politicians and celebrities who are more than happy to write blog posts for free to promote their latest creative endeavors or causes?

Freelancers who write for AOL say that in the immediate aftermath of the deal’s announcement things are still very up in the air, with staff editors not knowing exactly what’s going to happen.

Also unknown is what will happen to AOL’s Patch hyperlocal news endeavor, which Armstrong has promised will stretch to 1,000 cities by the end of the year, but about which critics say isn’t going very well? And where does it leave Seed, AOL’s user-generated content site?

Those answers are in the hands of Huffington, who as part of the deal is taking over control of editorial creation for the merged company, making her the grand poobah of content.

Some writers have speculated that she’ll take the money and run. I’m not counting on that. With power, reach and budget she’s never had before, Huffington could settle in for the long haul, make herself one of the most powerful people in online media. Take that Tina Brown.

It will be interesting to see how AOL and HuffPo’s competitors respond. I’m thinking of particularly of Yahoo, which bought Associated Content, to bolster its own news endeavors. Then there’s Demand Media – fresh off its initial public offering – Examiner.com, Helium, Studio 101 and all the other content farms, which a combined AOL-HuffPo could take on, especially in view of goals for increasing content and viewership that Armstrong set out in his “The AOL Way” memo leaked by Business Insider just days before the merger was announced.

Of course, AOL has been here before. A decade ago, the company announced a merger with Time Warner they believed would create a digital media colossus “with the potential to reach every American in one form or another.” It never took. The “synergy” that was supposed to take place never materialized, and the companies eventually unwound and went their separate ways.

That word – synergy – always reminds me of the scene in “In Good Company” where the evil CEO Teddy K (in an uncredited cameo by Malcolm McDowell) talks about the great connections that will come out of his company buying up the magazine publisher. The young manager brought into make it happen, played by Topher Grace, totally buys into it, unlike Dennis Quaid’s middle-age ad exec, who sees it for the bull that it is. Before the end of the movie they both get screwed and those promised synergies vanish like the vapors they were.

What do you think? Is this a match made in new media heaven? Or will it become hell on earth for the editors, writers and other freelancers at the bottom of this corporate combination?

I’d put out a call to writers and editors on LinkedIn asking for names of industry folks I should include. But instead of news industry luminaries, I kept getting social media trailblazers. Wait a minute, I wanted to say, you don’t understand – social media isn’t the same as online news.

Then I started using Twitter. It didn’t take long to figure out that for the people who hang out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other online networks the social media hotdogs and digital media trendsetters are one in the same. They’re the ones people friend, follow and read. They’re the ones broadcasting the news of a US Airways plane going down in the Hudson River and Barack Obama’s inauguration  – regardless of who they are, where they are, their day job, their background or experience.

That meant I had to rethink my definition of trendsetter.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s totally subjective and different from what I would have picked six month ago, and probably what I’d pick six months from now. When possible, I’ve linked their names to their Twitter IDs or websites.

The Old School

• Bill Keller - Executive editor of the New York Times, charged with bringing the Grey Lady into the 21st century. Appointed paper’s first social media editor earlier this week.
• Jonathan Miller – Former AOL chief recently hired by Rupert Murdoch to run News Corp.’s digital interests, including MySpace and Hulu (minus the Wall Street Journal).
• Russ Stanton – Los Angeles Times editor. Figuring out a way how to stay relevant – and solvent – in the Internet age.
• Dean Singleton – Head of MediaNews Group, which owns the Denver Post and 99 other media properties, and leader of the charge to help newspapers monetize the Web.

The New Wave

• Tina Brown – Proprietress of The Daily Beast, a cross between the Conde Nast glossies she used to edit and a daily politics and gossip column.
• Arianna Huffington – HuffPost founder; gadfly turned new media publisher.
• Hyperlocal news bloggers – NeighborsGo, NewzJunky, SealBeachDaily.com, WestSeattleBlog, Neighborhood Notes, the list goes on and on
• Josh Marshall – Creator of Talking Points Memo, political blog that won a George Polk Award in 2008 for reporting on the firings of US attorneys.
• Paul Steiger – Former WSJ managing editor and current editor in chief at ProPublica, another high-profile online-only news outfit doing original investigative journalism on a non-profit basis.

The Professors

• Jeff Jarvis – J-school prof at City University of New York, Buzz Machine blogger, author of What Would Google Do? and former magazine and newspaper reporter, columnist and editor.
• Jay Rosen – NYU journalism prof, PressThink blogger and director of NewAssignment.Net, “an experiment in open-source reporting.”
• Sree Sreenivasan – Tech evangelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School, know for his extensive new media workshops.

The Promoters

• Seth Godin – Author, viral marketer extraordinaire, quipster.
• Guy Kawasaki – Entrepreneur, author, social media guru, proprietor of AllTop “online magazine rack” and blogger at How to Change the World. On Twitter at @guykawasaki.
• Peter Shankman – PR guy and founder of Help a Reporter Out crowdsourcing service for reporters.

The Pundits

• Paul Gillin – Social media expert, author and chronicler of newspaper hard times at Newspaper Deathwatch.
• Mark Glaser – Columnist for PBS MediaShift, “Your guide to the digital media revolution.”
• Alan Mutter – Newsman turned venture capitalist and blogger at Reflections of a Newsosaur.
• Jeremiah Owyang – Forrester Research social media analyst.

The Tech Geeks

• Chris Brogan – Mr. Social Media. Read and learn.
• Matt Mullenweg – Founding developer of WordPress blogging software, used by newspapers such as the New York Times, and head of WordPress’ parent company, Automattic.
• Dipchand “Deep” Nishar – Former Google exec who became LinkedIn’s v.p. of products in early December and has since rolled out a bevy of service upgrades.
• Darren Rowse – The Aussie blogging mastermind behind ProBlogger.
• Robert Scoble – Uber tech geek. Former Microsoft tech evangelist and Fast Company videographer blogging at Scobleizer.com.
• Biz Stone and Evan Williams – Co-founder and CEO of Twitter respectively. Reportedly turned down a $500 million buy out offer from Facebook earlier this year.

Know other new media pioneers I should include? Leave a comment. If I get enough I’ll re-post an expanded list.

A penny for my thoughts? – The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd uses the paper’s Op-Ed pages to ruminate on the trend of outsourcing newspaper work to India. Dowd interviews James Macpherson, publisher of Pasadena Now, an online only news site, who fired his former staff of seven and now outsources production to India. “I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” Macpherson says in Dowd’s column. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

Huffington Post more valuable than some newspaper cos. – Yes, you read that right. The Huff Post, the news blog that repackages – or in Webspeak “repurposes” – news and columns created elsewhere along side posts written by its own often unpaid bloggers, raised $25 million in financing, putting its value at $100 million. According to Michael Learmonth’s story in Ad Age, that makes Arianna Huffington’s digital news venture more valuable than Lee Enterprises, which publishes the St. Louis Post Dispatch, or A. H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News, or Media General, which puts out the Tampa Tribune. It’s conventional freelance wisdom to follow the money and go where the work is, but in this case, freelancers should proceed with caution. While it’d be nice to be associated with an up and coming news aggregator like the Huff Post, is the clip worth the non paycheck you’d get for your efforts? Working for free is not a business model.

Notice anything different about this blog? – No, you don’t. But as of yesterday, WordPress parent company Automattic released a much-anticipated dashboard redesign. While readers of this blog won’t see any difference, behind the scenes is another story. The main page that WordPress bloggers like me use to write and manage posts got a major a face lift. So far, it’s been easy enough to navigate without having to peek at the instructions. But if you’re interested, here’s the complete documentation of the changes. According to Automattic, the changes will be released as version 2.7 to WordPress.org bloggers next week.

I finally met Arianna Huffington four years later. I was writing a column about politics and the Internet for Reuters and covered a speech she was making at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. By then Huffington was divorced, on her way to eventually severing ties with the Republican party, and on the stump to promote her latest book, Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom. She was as knowledgeable, articulate and mesmerizing as advertised.

Today, Huffington is famous – or infamous, depending on who you talk to – as the founder and chief creative power behind The Huffington Post, the influential news blog. Even before her Internet days, Huffington was not shy about promoting herself or her latest venture. That’s crystal clear in a new profile of her, The Oracle, The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington, by Lauren Collins, published in the Oct. 13 issue of The New Yorker.

Ten years ago, Huffington was already talking about the Internet’s potential power in politics. Here’s what I wrote in that Reuters column:

Today’s Internet-using pols still number a tiny minority. But that should grow as they learn how to exploit the medium to mobilize voters around issues they care about, said Arianna Huffington, the noted pundit. “The more they’re for the status quo, the less likely they’ll be to use it,” Huffington said. “The more politicians who are reformers, the more they’ll use the power of the Internet. We haven’t even begun to scratch its potential for communications in politics.”

Check out that last line again. Huffington wouldn’t launch her namesake Website for another seven years. But it’s clear she knew she was onto something.