YouSaid · the spoken record

Lydia Polgreen

lines on the record
52
first
2018-02-17
most recent
2018-02-17
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Peter and I are starting a new nightclub called Grumpy's. It's going to be great. Think about it all the time It's going to be great. You guys will talk about it. There will be a subscription model for that.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I think that as far as I know, there are basically two and a half ways to make money in media, right? You can sell advertising against the audience that you're getting. You can sell a subscription. Usually those two go together, right? It's not like if you subscribe to the New York Times, you don't see any ads, you'll see lots of ads. And then finally, there's bundling, right? And that also includes ads, right? So if you get CNN as part of your cable bundle, your cable provider, there's money changing hands somewhere that's a sliver of what you're paying is going to them. But then you're also going to see ads in addition to that. So they're really, every funding model out there includes some form of advertising, and it's really all about diversity of revenue right now. Everybody's looking for ways to supplement advertising, not get rid of it.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “No, we don't. I hate them. I've just been in a war with the New York Times over their gay shirt ad that comes to me. They have a gay. Yes. I get it, just me, I guess. I don't like the Zappos ad that tells me to buy the shoe that I.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, no, I do, but we got a lot of different things going on at the same time. So there's definitely a balance. And there's also, I think, a lot of questions about how all of our different systems, again, we've just gone through a merger, are going to work together, right? You've got one ad server that powered Yahoo, another that powered AOL, those things are coming together. The audience networks are coming together. And so I think in the middle of all of that, we found ourselves with experiences like this one, which are absolutely not ideal.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Oh, I mean, I think it can't be repeating the same ad over and over again. It can't be in the way of you getting the thing that you were actually looking for. It should be informative. It should be relevant. And I think there are a variety of ways.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I mean, I'm surprised because that's actually not been my experience, but I'd love to, I'm going to come up to you after and you're going to show me. But I think the reality is that we have not invested enough in making sure that our customer experience is the best one that it could possibly be. And we need to fix that. So I'm glad that you raised it. And I think that advertising needs to be smart in order to actually get through to people and clobbering over the head like that, probably not the best way to do it.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I definitely don't think it's dissipating. I think that there has been a backlash and then we've already had a backlash to the backlash. I'm not sure where we are on the Mobius Strip right now. But this is going to continue to be a major thing. I was at Makers last week and there's just so much conversation about Makers as a women's conference for those of you who don't know run by Oath There's so much energy and conversation and activism that's bubbling up around this issue of gender and really workplace that I think is not going away anytime soon.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “It was one of the most heartbreaking things that I've ever read, and the way that it resonated with our audience, and people still write to me about it, really taking these questions, these kind of structural questions about industries and writing about them in a holistic way in a way that's not just about Hollywood stars, but is about ordinary working people is a major focus area for us. So we have a couple of different projects going right now that look at women in a variety of industries, some of them white collar, some of them blue collar, and that's going to be a major...”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So we focused on two aspects of it. One is the enablers, and media is a big part of that. So a lot of the work that we've been doing with Yashar Ali, who works for us, he's a sort of a super freelancer. He works for a few different people, but mostly for HuffPost. He's done a lot of really great work on the media infrastructure that protects a lot of these abusers, but we also have other reporters who've been working on variety National Inquirer who broken fairly major stories about the media ecosystem and how it protects people. And then the other end of the spectrum, we've been really focused on ordinary working people. So one of our labor reporter, Dave Jameson, we still have a labor reporter, did a really gut-wrenching story about hotel housekeepers.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Two things. One is we're really excited to expand our service journalism because I think that that's actually something that's really important to people and makes people's lives better. And I think of service as not being like what dress to wear, but it's how do I deal with the fact that I'm part of a generation that is facing a really horribly economic future? How do I make sense of that? So that's one thing. And the other is investigative journalism. I'd love to expand our footprint in investigative journalism that hasn't traditionally been a huge part of what HuffPost does, but I think we could do extraordinary things with it. And then finally, I think spanning across all those things is video. Let's create the next version of 48 hours or 60 minutes. Let's make documentaries that we distribute on Verizon platforms.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And I think that I don't think it's my place to say to Carrie Budolf Brown, you're putting too many resources into covering the ins and out of the administration given the scoops that we get.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Maybe, but I'm also just not a question that really interests me, I guess, you know, because I just think that Each of us needs to think about our own newsrooms and what we can do to provide something interesting and impactful. I think it's really important that we know what's going on in the White House and I think that there are a handful of reporters, I mean Josh Dosse at the now at the Washington Post, just a machine. I love reading those stories and I think they're really, really interesting and they're important and it's important for the historical record. But it's also not the only thing that these news organizations are doing. I mean, they're breaking stories left and right. I mean, you look at Politico, I mean, what a year Politico has had.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “On how you define the media, right? So I look at the New York Times, they have something like 1,450 journalists. And I think that it's absolutely right and correct that they expend considerable time and resources given the scope of what they cover to bring us the Maggie Haberman scoops. I'm incredibly grateful that they do that. I don't feel like it's our job to compete with that. And I think that when you look at the overall ecosystem, different media organizations have different roles to play. I don't feel like that's our role to play, but I'm grateful that others are doing that.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Strong interest in healthcare. And so we get those signals in the entire newsroom now is really organized around those subjects and going out and chasing them in a really meaningful way.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Sure. I mean, I think the great thing about Huff Post, and this, I think, was something that didn't really need changing, is that it has really, really strong political coverage. Our team in DC, they get great scoops. They're really great at defining what the most important issues are and saying, don't look over there, look over here. We also have a great team on the Hill that Matt Fuller has the Freedom Caucus wired. We've got a team that does healthcare like nobody's business. So, you know, I'm incredibly proud of our Washington coverage, and most of what I've done is said, you guys, keep doing what you're doing. You're awesome. So, you know, I think that's something that we're getting from our audience is signals about these are the things we really care about, strong interest in all of the issues around voting rights and gerrymandering, strong interest in criminal justice.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “About we just recently did one about air pollution in Orlando, it's really to report back to folks on the Upper West Side or folks in Pacific Heights about what's going on in that. This is what it's like out there. We really strive to be writing for the people who are actually experiencing it. So this big global project that we did on air pollution, we actually again used some Facebook marketing money to make sure that those stories were being read and shared by the communities that are most affected.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So, I think that one thing that's clear is that we need to be focused on issues that really affect people's lives and write about them in really kind of. Relevant ways to people's experience. So it's not just about covering Trump and covering the Trump administration. It's not just about who's going to win in 2018 and those kinds of things. Although those stories are really important to a significant part of our audience. We found that there's tremendous interest, for example, in our coverage of the opioid epidemic, which is like a lot of people are covering the opioid epidemic, but we've really taken a kind of service approach to it and writing coverage that's aimed at helping people who are dealing with it and creating communities and newsletters and things like that. So it's less about this is the style of story than we need to do than it is about this is the kind of relationship that we're going to have with our audience. And it's fundamentally one of service. That's for me really the four rather than about question. When a big national news organization goes in and does a story about coal country or does a story”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “With people across the country are really, we're currently in the process of analyzing them all now, are really going to inform our national reporting strategy.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “One of the big things that we did was this trip across America. We did listen to America bus tour. We went to 26 cities. We didn't go to the coasts. We were inland places like Fort Wayne, Indiana, Livingston, Montana, and really just listening to people about the issues that were most important in their communities. We did a tremendous amount of work to try and turn out not just people who would be drawn to a huff post event, but people who really wanted to talk about local issues. That involved a lot of outreach through local TV news, which turns out is a really important source of information for people in local communities, but we also did a lot of paid Facebook targeting so that we could invite people and reach out to people who didn't necessarily fit into what you would think of as the HuffPost demographics. So we got a lot of those folks to come to our events, talk to them, talk about the issues that are on their minds. And those interviews, and we ended up doing a thousand interviews with, I'm sorry, almost 2,000 interviews.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “She did, and I would take a different approach personally as a journalist For me, it's less about who you voted for and more about kind of where you stand in the overall political and economic power arrangements. I think that we live in a world in which inequality is deepening and there is a kind of top layer of society that includes pretty much all of us in this room who have kind of detached in an escape pod and are floating away with the American dream. So I really think about that bottom 80% as including a lot of people who voted for Trump, a lot of people who voted for Bernie Sanders, and a lot of people who voted for Hillary, but primarily there are people who feel left out of the prevailing political and economic power arrangements. I mean, I got a big tax cut. You probably did too. And I think about the folks who voted for Trump and maybe got a tiny little tax cut, and I want to write stories for them.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Getting to that last year, you talked a lot about who you are writing for and the groups of people that you needed to be writing about, but actually specifically who you were writing for. And you said one of the things you wanted to do was reach out to Trump voters, which had not been. Something the Huffington Post had done. Arianna had very loudly talked about covering him as entertainment. And of course.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Maybe, maybe. I mean, one of the reasons that I decided to take this job was what I saw as a stratification of society into media haves and have nots. It seems to me that there are a bunch of news organizations that have found not a bunch, but a handful of news organizations that have found tremendous success.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Sure. Is there a scenario in which we develop some sort of a membership strategy? Absolutely. But I think it's a little bit of a ways off.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “I think it's an interesting idea. I don't think we're there yet. I really deeply believe in having low to no cost to consumer, high-quality news available as part of a democracy. I think that there's always going to be a part of the population that is never going to lean forward and pay for news. If they do, it's via their cable bundle or in the future possibly via their mobile phone bill, which they're paying for for other reasons, sports, the entertainment, all those kinds of things, but they'll also flick on CNN when something's happening. So I am very committed to the idea of free to no cost to consumer news. And given my druthers, I would love for Huff Post to remain as free to know cost to consumers as possible. Is there a scenario in which we develop a paid product?”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “A lot of people go to AOL.com as well. And so it's a mix of there's a small team that does original journalism as part of Yahoo News, but from a consumer-facing perspective, Yahoo News is just, you go to Yahoo.com and those are, it's full of articles that are syndicated from a bunch of different content. You get AP Reuters, New York magazine, you name it. It's all up there. And so when most people think of Yahoo News, that's what they're thinking of, is that platform. Then we also have newsroom, which is a mobile app that we've been working on and playing around with that, again, is filled with content from all these different places and then all the different”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “No, I mean, I think Yahoo News is basically two different things, right? Yahoo remains, I know people think, oh, who has lots of people go to Yahoo every single day? They have it as their homepage.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Well, you know, I think that in any content business, you want to try and focus your efforts and remove overlap as much as possible. So I think if you're going to have different brands within a company, they need to be really clearly identified and articulated. And I mean, one of the things that I really admire about Vox is that it's very clear what is eaters purview. Even, you know, you could say recode and the Verge have some overlap, but they really don't. They do very different things. And so I think that the broader strategy has to be one towards thinking in a very clear way and a very defined way about what lane you're in and how the different branches work together.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I think that's a question that people are thinking about is how do we rationalize the resources that we have? You've got HuffPost, you've got Yahoo News, you've got Yahoo Entertainment, you've got HuffPost Entertainment, you've got Yahoo Finance. There's a lot of different brands. And look, we're just a little more than six months into this. So I think that there are some questions that I think are going to get ironed out eventually. What you like.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Well, so I'm part of the news group that is run by Jared Groost, who's the CEO. And so we work collaboratively with Yahoo News, which is a small news team that was part of the legacy Yahoo platform. And we all report up into the same order.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “It's full of free content, but it's free content that's connected to people that you know, so it's free content that presumably will be relevant to you. I mean, look, the idea of taking a bunch of content and throwing it up on the internet and charging for advertising alongside it is a very 2007, 2008 business model. There is essentially no business in that kind of scale without real definition, a real sense of who your audience is, a deep relationship with that audience, and something that you can sell. It's just not, you know, I mean, we're part of oath, right? And oath has yahoo.com. They have AOL.com. We touch over a billion consumers every month. So I don't think they're looking to us and saying, give us more page views. We got tons of page views. It's a different kind of value that you're seeking when you're creating content.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “We get better content that gets more eyeballs. Now, the average piece is getting over 50 times the number of page views than a contributor piece used, the average contributor piece used to get. To me, I don't understand how anybody thinks that you're going to get scale out of publishing stuff that doesn't necessarily Find an audience.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “So little couple of numbers for you. The pieces that we've done on the two sections that we created that are these paid and commission sections, one's called opinion, which is a kind of traditional op-ed page, and the other is called personal, which is really about person storytelling and what we're calling person-first storytelling as told dudes, things like that. We're on track to exceed the number of total number of page views by as much as 25% in our first month from what we got from the contributor network. And you're talking about a tiny, tiny fraction. I mean, there were thousands of pieces that would come over the transom into the contributor network every month. And, you know, we're doing maybe 100 altogether. And we're getting 25% more traffic from doing that 100 pieces.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “I'm all for getting paid for work, and I think that's a good idea. And I think content is a good thing to pay for. But the other reason that people like the idea of contributor networks, Forbes.com still has them, and I think Tronk was going to have one, I assume, is that they do generate a lot of content that you could put ads against. When you told the folks at Verizon, we're going to cut off this content-making factory that we have, did they push back?”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “The RA manual thing, but when candidate Barack Obama wanted to respond to the allegations about his former pastor, Reverend Wright, he chose to blog on HuffPost, then the Huffington Post. And so it was a thing that had an enormous amount of cultural currency and weight at the time. But now fast forward to 2018, we actually have a surfeit of platforms in which people can express themselves, and we have the opposite problem of just complete cacophony. There's so much information out there. And we as a newsroom found that there was tremendous confusion about what is contributor content, what is actual journalism that's been created by the HuffPost newsroom. And so at this point in our history, it seemed to make sense, particularly in the environment of fake news and all kinds of nastiness that's going on in our business.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “So, the contributor network was essentially a blog where people could upload their own content to HuffPost, and it would be featured on the HuffPost homepage. For free, yeah, and people would get invited, and then at a certain point it became almost anybody who applies can blog here. Circa 2005, that was a revolutionary concept. The idea that there would be a platform of that kind. And people often forget just how influential it was. I didn't realize this until I went back and revisited a lot of history.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “The wholeness of the person, that dedication to helping people live really fulfilling healthy lives, those kinds of things I think are really essential to our identity. And so those have remained. But there are other things that have really changed, and probably the most dramatic change since Ariana's departure is that we shut down the contributor network, which was really a founding...”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “There have been some departures. I mean, look, Ariana created an extraordinary brand. When I worked for the New York Times, I used to go all around the world, talk to people about media brands. And the fact that Huff Post was as ubiquitous as the New York Times, which has been around since 1860 something, is a testament to the power of the thing that Ariana built. And all companies that are found or run, I think try to figure out how do we save and keep what is most important about the DNA of this thing in order to give it life after the founder leaves. And I think it was really an open question, what is a post-Ariana Huffington post look like? And I knew coming in that there were certain things about Huff Post that we really wanted to preserve. Keeping audience at the center of it, elevating voices that don't usually get a platform, really thinking about”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Called Tomorrow Inshallah. We have a closed Facebook group called So You Want to Raise a Feminist That Sprung Up Out of Our Parenting Coverage post-2016 election. And those are really important places for us to understand our audience and to develop content strategies around subjects that we think we want to invest in.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah, no. I mean, it's a huge story for us. But, you know, I think that for us, Facebook, both from a monetization perspective and also as a place for us to connect with our audience is just not necessarily been a particularly reliable partner. And I think that that's, I don't know that that's necessarily Facebook's conscious doing, but it's just the reality of how their business works. So we've sought out other ways where we can connect with our audience in meaningful ways. Now, I will say, however, that we have invested significantly in community pages that are, in many cases, not even branded huff posts. So, for example, we have a page for millennial introverts called canceled plans, and we feed a lot of huffpost content into it, but we also take a lot of stuff from other places. But it's basically for us a petri dish, which we can understand, is this an area where we really want to invest in doing more journalism? You know, we have one from Millennial Muslims.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Yeah, that kind of stuff. And so laying that groundwork and having a smart strategy about how you're going to really be there and serve your audience with the information that they need when they need it and when they're looking for it, I think that's much more reliable than sort of surfing the uncertain, a lot of surfing talk. I think it must be the location.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “I think it's a mix of factors. I think it's partly that it wasn't necessarily the place where we felt we were going to find the audience that was most interested in what we were doing. We follow like all modern digital media companies, we follow where the audience is going. And as Facebook became less and less a place where people were going for news, we started to put our efforts elsewhere and we really invested in Apple News. And we really doubled down on SEO because it turns out that SEO is really important. So for example, entertainment is a really big part of what we do, lifestyle, cultural reporting. So we've made some long-term investments in our coverage of streaming shows. And it's really service oriented journalism for people who are like, what should I watch?”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Long before, yeah. And for us, I would say Apple News is actually in some ways a more important platform. And Apple News is a place where people actually intentionally go to consume news. So we've actually had tremendous success there. And the story of HuffPost has really been one of surfing the waves of content disruption, right? I mean, it was first it was Google and they surfed the hell out of that SEO wave and became the number one SEO publisher. What time is the Super Bowl everyone? Most famous headline of Huff Post history. And then Social comes along. We become the number one publisher on Facebook. Now, Apple won't say this, but I think we're pretty close to being the number one publisher on Apple News. And that's the superpower of Huff Post is the ability to make really great content that resonates with our audience wherever they go. And so we feel really good about our ability.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “I think that there's likely going to be some period of uncertainty. I mean, as of right now, it's essentially had no effect. But I think what we've been told to expect is lots of turbulence, lots of changes, lots of tweaks that may have big effects, small effects. But like most publishers who are producing original content that's deep original journalism, We've actually seen a significant decline in how much of our traffic is coming from Facebook and it's been made up by the resurgence of Google.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Well, we've been experimenting a lot with different formats. We have a great new product that we created called the Post Show that is two people talking about the Oscars, two people talking about the Grammys. Huge engagement. A lot of people want to watch. A lot of people want to engage with it and sending questions and things like that. We've done a lot of the same sorts of short video with text on the screen that does great on social. I think no one monetizes that stuff. It's great for getting your brand out there, but ultimately it's not really what you're about. We're making some long-term bets on documentary style video, things that are 30, 60, 90 minute length. We're not ready to talk about the subject matter yet, but keep an eye out for that. So we're trying a lot of different things and playing in a lot of different spaces, and we'll see which one of them turns out to be most exciting for us.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “We have a lot of words, but it turns out that words are actually a really convenient way to consume information, particularly news. And news is one of my bosses, Simon Kulloff, likes to say that news is the dial tone of media. And I always say to him that to you? He does. And I always say to him, you know, dial tone, you might want to think about a slightly more modern reference. But I think it's true. It's the thing that gets people coming back every day again and again and again. And we do a lot of video. The reality is we've seen 300% growth since we brought on Shelly Venus as our head of video from Mike. We've seen 300% growth in our distributed video, 90% growth year over year on YouTube, for example, the level of engagement. I mean, our completion rate on our Apple News video, most people on Apple News have very low completion rates. Ours is up, I think, above 40%. So we're actually doing a ton of video. And I see”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “I would not love for Huff Post as a business to have some kind of privileged access to pipelines that are built by Verizon, but I certainly wouldn't want that to be the case of the exclusion of other voices.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Absolutely content maker at the core. I think the biggest issue that any journalist would worry about is interference and independence. And that has just not been an issue at all. We've taken very strong stands at Huff Post on questions of net neutrality, written very critically about monopoly power and things like that. So our journalistic independence has been sacrosanct. And I honestly didn't really have any concerns about that going in. I do think that Looking ahead at a world in which the device on which we're getting our content also is owned by people who are making content, I think that there are real questions of free speech and accessibility, particularly in a world without net neutrality. And those are things that we're going to have to confront and cover. You want to be part of a vibrant ecosystem of information. That's what's good for democracy.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “But when you have that ownership, what do you worry about in that you have Comcast on NBC? You've got AT&T allegedly buying some companies at some point Have yours. Talk about the problems you foresee as a content maker because you are a content maker at your core.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “I'm not sure whether to say I'm sorry to encourage you have done that or not some days. You know what I mean when I think about all the changes that are happening there. But talk about what the problems of being part of a bigger company is. Now we're owned by Comcare, I mean, investment by Comtahast.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “That's true, but if you're owned by the phone company and you have powerful relationships with equipment manufacturers, if you have great technology teams that are building dedicated experiences for the phone, I think it gives you an enormous leg up.”

    2018-02-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen (Live at Code Media 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT