Woman in the News: Arianna Huffington
By David Gelles
Published: February 11 2011 20:47 | Last updated: February 11 2011 20:47
When Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post in 2005, critics wrote off the venture as doomed from the start. “The Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many,” said acid-tongued Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke. “She is finally played out publicly.”
Ms Huffington had indeed already played many roles, from international socialite, to best-selling author, to California gubernatorial candidate, to political pundit on both the right and left. This latest venture, pitched as a blog for her and her famous friends, seemed thin at best and self-aggrandising at worst. Even allies were sceptical. “It seemed like an interesting, if not very probable, idea,” says Bill Hillsman, who ran communications for her 2003 campaign and writes for HuffPo.
Less than six years later, however, Ms Huffington has never seemed more comfortable in the spotlight. With the sale of HuffPo to AOL for $315m this week, she has affirmed her bona fides as a dealmaker and tastemaker, and will now assume editorial control of a vast collection of online properties, from the influential TechCrunch blog to the AOL homepage.
It is one of the symbolic deals of what many are calling another dotcom bubble, and also the highest sum ever paid for a blog. But her proven protean persona notwithstanding, Ms Huffington must now perform her greatest reinvention yet, helping turn round the foundering AOL.
The round-cheeked and famously red-haired 60-year-old will be the face of this expanding empire, and HuffPo, now with 25m monthly readers and 440m page views a month, will be its spiritual centre.
The website is a jumble of often disparate ideas and influences, not unlike the career of its founder. Born into the Greek intelligentsia as Arianna Stassinopoulos, she studied economics at Cambridge University and had a stint when she was best known in the gossip pages as partner to Bernard Levin, the polymathic British journalist and wit. On HuffPo, investigative news, cultural criticism and celebrity gossip all coexist.
If it is not always coherent, that is perhaps an accurate reflection of Ms Huffington, who has written books on topics from Picasso to politics. In the US, she married a Republican oilman, Michael Huffington, had two daughters with him before they divorced, and then went on to become an outspoken Democrat. “Part of the reason she’s been so successful is that she’s willing to change her mind,” says one long-time associate. “She wants differing opinions.” The one-time critic of Bill Clinton went on to endorse Democrat John Kerry for president.
Her admirers cite this as a sign of her savviness. “She’s tremendously smart,” says Mr Hillsman. “Sometimes that gets overlooked.” She is also, by all accounts, acutely aware of how she is viewed by others. “She’s very cognisant of her public image,” says one person who has worked closely with her for years. “She has Google alerts for her name and the website, and different iterations of all the terms. If there is anything negative she goes after it.”
A singular moment of self-awareness came “the first day that a HuffPo story was referenced in a New York Times article”, she tells the Financial Times. “It was really a coming of age, the fact that our original reporting was now shaping the national conversation, which was always a goal of mine.”
That Ms Huffington seeks validation from The New York Times is not without irony. HuffPo is often accused of piggybacking on the work of traditional media outlets while at the same time hastening their demise. Indeed, much of the site’s traffic is derived from aggregation – the summarising of original reporting in mainstream media outlets.
Yet, the fact that HuffPo is at heart a referential publication should come as no surprise, given its founder. “She is, in her social life, an aggregator,” says a friend. Sure enough, in the course of a 25-minute conversation with the FT, she name-drops everyone from author Nora Ephron to the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera.
The qualities that define her, including charm and intensity, have made her business a success. But her record as a manager is patchy. “She’s impetuous,” says one employee. “She doesn’t have great impulse control.” Her impulsiveness was on view last year when she announced on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that HuffPo would provide free buses from New York to Washington, so that people could attend Mr Stewart’s rally. “I came up with that idea when I was on air,” she tells the FT.
What she did not anticipate is that 10,000 people would take her up on the offer, requiring a scramble for 300 buses and $250,000 in sponsorship. “That’s what HuffPost is like,” says one ex-employee. “Do your base job plus all these other Arianna things that are sort of crazy.”
Those familiar with her spontaneity say it could make for a difficult fit at AOL, which has a surprisingly bureaucratic culture for a digital company. “Arianna has a lot of pet projects and causes that may not work when she’s running something as big as this,” says one former HuffPo emp loyee. “It’s going to be interesting to see how her management style scales to the corporate level.”
Internal tensions at HuffPo were already rising before the sale. Some on the business side wanted to take the company public, but HuffPo’s financial backers were eager for a clean exit. “We were not looking to sell the company,” Ms Huffington says. “But when [AOL chief executive] Tim Armstrong came forward, it made sense.” With AOL paying a staggering 10 times HuffPo’s revenues of $31m, she could hardly say no.
She has capitalised handsomely, though the exact figures have not been revealed, capping off the singular achievement in her already impressively diverse career. She concedes editing AOL is not what she expected she might do when she was at Cambridge. “Blogging had not even been invented,” she says, “I became a writer by accident.”
That’s a classic Arianna line, suggesting her career has been one happy adventure. Proving that HuffPo and her outsize personality are worth a small fortune, however, will require rather more: deliberate, and measurable, success.
