The Washington Post also does actual reporting, unlike the Huffington Post; they actually produce something of value, even if they don't monetize it as successfully.
This has been happening for many decades now, especially in the TV news industry. If anything, I would expect the trend to accelerate and proliferate. It's going to become increasingly unprofitable to house the costs of news-gathering, and the revenue of ad-selling, under the same roof. A few outlets will keep at it, but on a much smaller and more selective scale, and mainly for specialized stories (investigative pieces, like the ones HuffPo does on occasion).
So does the Huffington Post, but many of the writers are unpaid contributors.
> they actually produce something of value...
Tell this to readers and advertisers, who are voting with their time and $.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ...
The implication is that the aggregated content lifted from other sites and the original content created by HuffPo writers gets 100x the traffic and eyeballs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/huffington-post-pul...
I mostly agree with your stance, but you've painted their entire body of work with the brush of their low-value, low-effort aggregation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KI-2Ira91E
(Thirty-second video clip, with knowing laughter from the audience.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/obama-wins-nobel-pe...
HuffPo might grow into a respectable news organization one day, but they still have a long road to get there.
Could you have more accurately finished "even if most people don't care for content of value" or "even if they use more staff, resources and care to produce it"?
By the way, I just looked at Google Trends and it now looks like HuffPo is driving 3-4x more traffic than WaPo. In 2008 it was much closer to parity.