Considering how, "in recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe they’re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers," with even "appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wr[iting] a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and paraphrasing their content," media blogger Simon Owens (Bloggasm.com, 7/6/09) has conducted an experiment to evaluate the premise of corporate media management "that news aggregators simply repackage news so there’s little incentive to click on the actual link":

So how much traffic does a large news aggregator like Huffington Post bring? I’ve been linked several times within Huffington Post, but typically on its users blogs, which only send a few hundred readers at most. But on early Friday I was fortunate enough to be featured prominently on Huffington Post’s front page with a banner headline linking to one of my articles.

How much traffic did this link bring? Lots. For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

But though the first day’s worth of traffic was the heaviest, the Huffington Post continued to send me strong traffic for two more days as the link moved down on its main page but remained prominent on its highly-trafficked Politics page.

"All together," Owens tells us, he "received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period," while days later "still seeing relatively strong traffic from there"--which all sounds like decidedly good news for linked-to big media outlets, doesn't it?

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an update (7/2/09, ad-viewing required) on "several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR's ban on using the word 'torture' to describe the Bush administration's interrogation tactics":

Given the utter vapidity of her rationale ("there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?"), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches "Media Ethics" to graduate students at Georgetown University....

NPR's "torture" ban and its ombudsman's incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR--and rightfully so. Yesterday, the Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard's refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard's refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR's policy. (Indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR's steadfast refusal to use the word "torture" and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that.)

Despite Shepard's avoidance of him, Greenwald notes that she "went on another NPR-affiliated show" for a segment "that included several good questions" and "a very well-compiled, illustrative and cringe-inducing montage of NPR's repeatedly going out of its way to avoid calling Bush interrogation tactics 'torture,' juxtaposed with an excerpt where NPR explicitly accused Iraqis in Sadr City of 'using torture' against detainees."

Read more on NPR's longstanding problematic reporting on U.S. torture--and Alicia Shepard's inconsistent defense of it--in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Tortured Justifications for Bad Journalism" (12/07) by Jim Naureckas & Candice O'Grady.