Digiday AI-Powered Planning Strategies:

Join us on July 30 in NYC for a breakfast & panel

APPLY TO ATTEND

Why Henry Blodget Has a ‘Buy’ on Media (and Slideshows)

Publishing models are undergoing challenging reformations as digital technologies continue to aggressively compete against traditional print formats.

Business Insider’s CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget sat down with Digiday’s editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey at last week’s Digiday Mobile conference to explain the advantage he sees upstart publishers have over legacy players. Blodget also defended TBI’s brash headlines and penchant for slideshows, pinning the backlash against the latter on the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

“I think that slideshows are actually a wonderful, native storytelling tool for mobile, and the Internet itself,” he said. “So many things that we’ve done with them, you cannot do [in print or on television].”

The former stock analyst who now helms a burgeoning media company believes that despite the many challenges facing publishing now is a great time to find new models for media businesses.

“The need for content is greater than ever; it is not going to go away,” he said. “As of yet, Google has not figured out an algorithm that can tell you a good story. It can point to good stories, it can figure out good stories people are passing around, and, yes, now a new company has figured out how to write earnings briefs automatically … so some storytelling may go that way, but human beings are storytelling animals. We want to know what’s going on, we like to hear that. So far you cannot do that with an algorithm.”

More in Media

WTF is LLM honeypotting?

Publishers and ecommerce brands under siege from AI crawlers are starting to fight back with an old security trick updated for the LLM era: “LLM honeypotting.” 

Why a once-anonymous creator unmasked herself to build a bigger media brand 

Kristi Cook used to YouTube anonymously. Once she revealed her face, her account became wildly popular.

Creators are crashing through Hollywood, but there’s a ceiling

Hollywood is tapping creators for hit horror films, unique IP, and cameos, but there are limits to their star power in its current state.