Dan Froomkin hired by HuffPo

According to Glenn Greenwald at Salon, ex-Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin, has just been hired by the Huffington Post to lead a new Washington Buearu for the website.

His firing and hiring is a significant story that has developed over the last few weeks and ties in to a number of themes of this course, most notably questions of bias and now old media v. new media. Greenwald states that:

Under still-unclear circumstances, which executives refuse to discuss even with their own Ombudsman, Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper’s most popular.  Almost immediately upon the reporting of Froomkin’s firing, screenwriter Nora Ephron, an Editor-at-Large for The Huffington Post, emailed Huffington with a one-line note:  “I hope we’re hiring him.”  Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week.

Glenn Greenwald goes on to say:

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying.  What is dying — and rightfully so — is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres.  As The Post‘s Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin’s firing left “an army of angry followers” and “an outcry from a loyal audience.”  People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices.  The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post‘s short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists.

Following the links in the article will help you get up to speed on the background of this story.