Arianna Huffington: The Web's New Oracle

Arianna Huffington: The Web's New Oracle
By Belinda Luscombe

There is flattery, there is shameless flattery, and there are conversations with Arianna Huffington. She'll talk to old men about their libido, beautiful women about their intelligence, the unemployed about their talent and the wealthy about their artistic depth. In her hands, a compliment is the social equivalent of a Tomahawk missile, launched in stealth at a heavily researched target and perilously difficult to defend against.

As recently as five years ago, this ability — plus a native braininess and a healthy dose of opportunism — had earned her a regular seat at soirées in the Washington–New York City–Los Angeles triad, as well as a modest media profile. She was once referred to as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus." (Watch an interview with Huffington.)

Today Icarus is in her shade. In February the Huffington Post, the website she started in 2005 with Ken Lerer and viral-marketing guru Jonah Peretti, became the 15th most popular news site, just below the Washington Post's and above the BBC's. It garnered 8.9 million unique users that month, according to Nielsen — more than double what it attracted a year ago. It gets a million-plus comments from readers a month. A business newswire recently valued the site at more than $90 million. Only one independently held online-content company (Nick Denton's Gawker properties) is worth more.

HuffPo, as it's known, has reached this level of prominence with 55 paid staffers, including Huffington. Twenty-eight of them are editorial, compared with more than 1,000 at the New York Times. Open the site on any given day and you will be greeted with copy from the Associated Press, contributions from unpaid writers, stories whose legwork was done by other news outlets and a smattering of entries from the site's five reporters. In terms of traditional newspaper content, that's about the level of a solid small-town daily.

But some people believe this model may fundamentally change the news business. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer became the first large daily newspaper to stop printing and move entirely to the Web, on March 18, the new site was structured uncannily like HuffPo, its original content reduced and jostling for space with guest blogs, wire stories and links to other news sites.

The success of her site has allowed Huffington, 58, to reinvent herself again, from Bush-bashing pundit to media mogul and digital pioneer. But as the enterprise grows, even a pedigreed networker like Huffington may find that it's hard to keep friends in the media when she's killing their business. (Read "The HuffPo Gets to Question Obama [EM] Making History.")

Necessary Huffness
All the residents of Huffington's large romantic stone house in Brentwood, Calif., are female: Huffington, her sister Agapi and her two daughters Christina, 19, and Isabella, 17. The walls of the living room are adorned with paintings by Françoise Gilot, one of Picasso's lovers, and Kimberly Brooks, the wife of actor Albert Brooks. Isabella's room is covered with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. Most members of the house staff are women — Huffington even uses her housekeeper as chauffeur when necessary. "My mom's not good at driving," Isabella says. The matriarch is a deft hostess; there's always something to eat and, in the way of female gathering places, lots of conversation.

The Huffington Post was hatched at a party here not long after the 2004 presidential election. Former AOL executive Lerer, who professes to hate parties and to barely have known Huffington at the time, had already launched an anti-NRA site. He saw the need for a counterpoint to Matt Drudge's popular right-leaning website. "For about half an hour it was called the Huffington-Lerer Report," says Lerer. "But I'm shy." He and Huffington raised a million dollars, and Lerer brought in Peretti, his buddy from the anti-NRA website. The Huffington Post was to have three basic functions: blog, news aggregator with an attitude and place for premoderated comments.

See the 25 best blogs of 2009.

See pictures of Huffington.

For Huffington, it was as if her whole life, with its mix of accomplishment and weird scandal, had been practice for working in a medium in which everything is interesting and nothing is durable. Educated at Cambridge University, she launched herself in the U.S. on the back of a book about Maria Callas (her third of 12) and a few key friends. Pretty soon, almost virally, she knew everybody, was marrying an oil millionaire (with Barbara Walters for a bridesmaid) and stumping for the Republicans. Almost as fast, she was divorcing said millionaire, who turned out to be bisexual, and becoming a Democratic champion. In 2003 she ran for governor of California but withdrew after it was revealed that she had paid only $771 in state taxes for the previous two years. She was pilloried for her connection to John-Roger and the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, which some claim is a cult. Less hardy souls might have fled the spotlight, but not Huffington. On the Internet, after all, nothing is set in stone; everything can be rewritten. History can be changed with a simple refreshing of the page.

She never lost the ability to win people over. "Before we launched, I just asked all my friends to write," says Huffington. "And then they get such a reaction that they get hooked and start writing a lot." Her special brand of Greco-American wrangling lured so many boldface names that the merely interesting wanted to write for her too. The Huffington Post now has 3,000 bloggers, all — media moguls take note! — unpaid. (Read TIME's 1995 story on Huffington, "A Woman on the Verge.")

HuffPo is not made for people who like their news straight. As the situation in Iraq got boggy, the economy soured and the Bush Administration's popularity face-planted, folks wanted a place to vent. And when the Obama phenomenon took off and Wall Street collapsed, they wanted a place where they could both celebrate and vent more. HuffPo was the easiest, most satisfying place to do it. "We like to expose hypocrisy," says Katharine Zaleski, the site's news editor. The Huffsters see what they do as curating the news: finding the good stuff from other sources and artfully exhibiting it for the enrichment of the more educated, liberal news consumer. And yet the site's most viewed stories often have to do with the trivial — every garment in Michelle Obama's wardrobe gets its due — and the racy. It's improbable that anything like the wildly popular HuffPo slide show of Pamela Anderson's disturbingly shaped nipple would be featured on, say, Politico.

That's just part of what concerns veteran news hands about HuffPo's rise. In December the site's Chicago section was found to have been plagiarizing. "This was a problem with an intern," says Huffington. "There was no excuse, and we corrected it." When I point out that the initial story the site posted in March on Nick Schuyler, the football player who survived a storm at sea, carried Zaleski's byline even though 80% of the copy was taken verbatim from the St. Petersburg Times, Huffington says that the story drew from several sources — and that they don't mind. "We drive millions of page views to people who produce content," she says, "and we get a hundred requests a day from editors and reporters to link to them." Not everyone is so thrilled. "HuffPo regularly borrows a chunk of our stories and repays us with a tiny link at the bottom," says a prominent Web editor. "It's a practice that really annoys me."

But HuffPo has also flourished by outsmarting everyone else. If you type "Nick Schuyler" into Google today, the Huffington Post's mashup account will appear above the original story in the St. Petersburg Times. That's Peretti's doing. In his hands, the site is particularly adept at what's known as search-engine optimization — making Google love you. How it's done is complicated and mostly secret, but one illuminating example came after the death of actor Heath Ledger. HuffPo fashioned its story so that anyone Googling a variation on the words "Keith Ledger" would see the HuffPo story at the top of the search results, thus snagging people who didn't know the actor's unusual name. The higher up a story appears in Google search results, the more page views — and ad money — it brings in.

While this is wily, it's legal. But news organizations may not tolerate others cherry-picking their content and repurposing it for profit for much longer. "Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post," says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "It's not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it's about the value." There are other aggregators, but HuffPo is the most tempting. "It's a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line" between fair and unfair use of copy, Benton notes.

The woman at the center of all this is offended and bewildered by the suggestion that other news outlets think she's getting a free ride. She sees herself as the future of journalism, not the end of it. She and Lerer continue to experiment with "distributive journalism," as they call it, in which anybody who observes a news event can report on it for HuffPo. They recently raised $25 million to launch an investigative-journalism fund and explore creating local city versions of the site.

Some of the journalistic resentment exists clearly because it's populist media done better than it's been done before. Another part of it is really about Huffington. HuffPo's speedy rise to prominence, courtesy of others' work, reminds some of its founder's own journey. Female ambition is a curious force. When its outlets are blocked, it sometimes seems to settle on the nearest object — a spouse, a child, a cause. But in rare cases, it finds its perfect vehicle. When that happens, it's best to get out of the road or jump in for the ride. Huffington might even let you drive.