Arianna Huffington, New York, March 28, 2011. Michael Rubenstein/Redux
January 25, 2015
Surrounded
by young assistants, Arianna Huffington runs
the growing Huffington Post empire
from a book-cluttered, glass-enclosed office looking out on a vast newsroom
with row upon row of editors and reporters at computer terminals. The
state-of-the-art digital media operation is a long way from her home in
Brentwood, California, where just ten years ago she and a few colleagues
dreamed up the news and blog site and sketched the future online powerhouse’s
first layout on a scrap of paper.
HuffPost has revolutionized journalism. Today, it employs more than 800
staffers and publishes the work of tens of thousands of unpaid bloggers. As of
January 2015, huffingtonpost.com ranked 28th among all U.S. websites (and 4th
among news sites) and 89th globally, according to the analytics firm Alexa. In
2011, HuffPost was sold for $315
million to AOL, where Huffington’s title is president and editor-in-chief of the
Huffington Post Media Group. In the same year HuffPost started up its first international editions, in Canada and
the United Kingdom. HuffPost won a
Pulitzer Prize in 2012—becoming only the second digital publication to do
so—for a series on wounded American military veterans.
Born Arianna Stassinopoulos, Huffington left her native Athens and studied economics at Cambridge University. She has authored fourteen books, including the recent No. 1 New York Times best-seller, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. She was married to (and later divorced from) California Republican congressman Michael Huffington. In 2003, Arianna Huffington herself stood briefly as an independent candidate for governor of California. A political activist and newspaper columnist, she became “addicted” to blogging in 2002. Her idea for a progressive-leaning website took hold after the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004. Cairo Review Managing Editor Scott MacLeod spoke with Huffington in New York on January 12, 2015.
CAIRO REVIEW: The attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris last
week—what do you make of that?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: The response has been
overwhelming. And that rally [in Paris on January 11] was very significant. For
me the most important thing is to keep making the distinction between the
extremism and Islam. I think when we blur the lines between extremism and what
Islam represents, that’s when it becomes much harder to find long-term
solutions.
CAIRO REVIEW: In Syria, we have journalists
being beheaded. Now we have an attack on a newspaper office in Paris.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Obviously it is an attack on free
expression. It is an attack on allowing diversity of opinion and tolerance of
all the principles fundamental not just for democracy but for humanity. Being able
to accept opinions when you disagree is at the heart of building a
civilization.
CAIRO REVIEW: Did Charlie make a mistake by publishing those cartoons?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We actually published those
cartoons after the terrorist attack to show solidarity. We decided to publish because
we felt it was important at that moment to show solidarity with all the forces
of tolerance and free expression. We have written so much about Islam, what a
great culture it is and what a great religion it is. We have established our
credentials here in terms of Islam. For us it was important to keep making that
distinction which sometimes gets blurred even by very intelligent people, who
want to say it’s the religion itself that promotes violence, and it is not. It
is the extremists who promote violence.
CAIRO REVIEW: Is there a line we should not
cross when it comes to respecting other religions and cultures, and the hurt
that certain opinions or styles of delivering opinions may cause?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Look at what has been done to
Christianity in the United States, the images of Jesus, including in modern
art. For me this in no way diminishes my love of the heart of what Jesus Christ
represents. So why is it so fragile that a satirical attack on a religious
figure is seen in those terms? Satire always had more leeway, going back to
Jonathan Swift, whose “Modest Proposal” about [poverty in] Ireland was eating
the children. Satire is based on exaggeration. And comedy and exaggeration have
always been given more leeway. If it is “where do you draw the line,” everybody
would draw the line differently; everybody’s “offense line” would be drawn
differently.
CAIRO REVIEW: Is this a clash of civilizations?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: No, I don’t think so. This is
about extremism. It is not about a particular culture or a particular
civilization. It is about a minority that steps into an existential vacuum, for
many young people who feel disconnected from any fundamental truths and
gravitate to some absolute doctrine.
CAIRO REVIEW: Is digital technology feeding
tensions between cultures?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: In my new book, Thrive, I wrote about what I called “the
snake in the Garden of Eden.” We all focus on the huge advantages in digital
technology and how it has brought the world together. But there is that snake
in the garden, which is the hyper-connectivity which disconnects us from
ourselves and from our own wisdom and source of truth, which I believe is
inside each human being whatever their religion or culture. We all have access
to that center of peace and wisdom in us. I think often technology and the
hyper-connectivity of technology can isolate us and disconnect us from that.
That’s a huge problem that can foster extremism. Also, of course, the fact that
extreme ideas can travel faster—in the same way that good ideas can travel
faster.
CAIRO REVIEW: You’ve been there since the
beginning of the digital revolution that has changed the landscape of
journalism. Now where is it all going?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I see the future in this hybrid,
which is a combination of great journalism, and a platform. That’s how I see
the Huffington Post, and frankly
that’s how I see the future of journalism generally. At HuffPost we have about 850 journalists, editors, reporters,
engineers working together all over the world. But we also have a platform that
has almost 100,000 bloggers, and which can be used by anyone who has something
interesting to say to distribute their opinions. To me, that is what the golden
age of journalism is going to be. Revering the best traditions of journalism,
in terms of long-form investigative reporting, fairness, accuracy, fact
checking. And at the same time, being able to provide a platform for people who
otherwise may not have a means of distribution but have something interesting
to say. This is not a free for all. It has to clear a quality bar. But also to
have no hierarchy except quality. At HuffPost
you can have a post by [French President] François Hollande but next week a
post by a student who nobody has heard of but who has an interesting opinion.
That is something that the new technologies have made possible.
CAIRO REVIEW: What contribution has the Huffington Post made to journalism and
society at large?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: The Huffington Post, going back to our founding, which is almost ten years
ago, created a platform which gave voice to many people who would not have had
a voice otherwise. And elevated the stature of blogging. Because we have no
hierarchy, and you can have a president next to a student, it meant that
not only thousands of people who would not have a voice have a voice, but it
was in the context of a very civilized conversation. Our comments were always
pre-moderated, so the conversation was not taken over by trolls. We could start
conversations about subjects and then stay on them, and bring in new voices.
The second thing is that from the beginning, the Huffington Post believed that it was very important to put the
spotlight on good things. Traditionally, journalists would say “if it bleeds,
it leads.” You put on the front page the crises and the disasters. But we
believe that—obviously you do that—but we also believe in putting the spotlight
on good things, on examples of compassion and ingenuity. Most recently, for example,
when violence erupted in Ferguson, we also at same time did a splash of the
good things happening in Ferguson: people supporting their neighbors, the
people going into schools to teach children when the schools were closed, et
cetera, et cetera. We believe that the media have not done a good job of
telling the full story. The full story is a mixture, of terrible things,
beheadings, killings, and amazing things happening. But if you go to most
papers or TV news reports, you wouldn’t know anything good is happening. So
that is really part of another contribution the HuffPost has made. The global—we see ourselves as a global
newsroom. Bringing together our coverage across the world, giving a platform to
people across the world to communicate with each other. Breaking down barriers.
CAIRO REVIEW: Institutionally what have you
done in terms of rebuilding the media landscape? You started this on the back
of a napkin in your home in Brentwood according to the legend. Now here you are
in big offices here in New York City.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We were part of the shift, away
from journalists seeing themselves as they once laid down the law, telling
people how the world was from up the mountaintop, and we began to show the
world of journalism as being a two-way street. So that at the core of what
we’ve done institutionally is engagement. Engaging our readers. Listening to
our readers. Having a two-way conversation with our readers, instead of
bringing the truth down from the top of Mount Olympus.
CAIRO REVIEW: Can everybody create a Huffington Post? What is the trick that
enabled your success?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Part of it is timing. It is very
hard now to create a major destination site. News travels more through social
now. Through being shared. People receive the news though their feeds, friends
on Facebook, tweets. The HuffPost is
probably the last major site to be a destination site. People go to HuffPost. And, our social traffic has
grown tremendously, too.
CAIRO REVIEW: Let’s talk about the media
poobahs, as you once called them. You’re becoming a poohbah yourself, I think.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Things have changed dramatically
in the media world since we launched. There has been a real convergence now,
between traditional media doing more and more online and new media like us
doing more and more of what is seen as traditional journalism. Investigative
journalism, long-form journalism. As you probably saw, we just hired these
great editors from the New Republic.
So there is not any more this distinction, this division. It is much more
blended.
CAIRO REVIEW: Former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller famously called you the
“Queen of Aggregation,” and talked about how the Huffington Post uses unpaid writers and aggregates what other
journalists are doing.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: He said that a long time ago. He
would never say that now. This was some of the misconceptions that have now
dramatically changed. The truth is that Huffington
Post does a lot of different things. It does traditional journalism of the
kind that won us a Pulitzer—which you don’t win for aggregation. It does
aggregation. We do aggregation proudly. We believe that there is so much good
stuff on the web that we don’t produce, and our job is to make everything that
is the best of the web—this is a promise to our readers—to make it available.
Whether we produce it, whether we aggregate it, or whether our bloggers write
it. And now I think that everybody accepts that everybody uses blogs from
people who are not on staff, who are not paid. It is the same principle as
people who go on TV, and they are not paid, because they want a larger platform
for their views.
CAIRO REVIEW: How has the relationship with AOL
changed the Huffington Post?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Our relationship with AOL has
dramatically accelerated our growth. When we moved into these offices four
years ago, we were in one country. We are now in thirteen countries, soon to be
in more in 2015. When we moved here we had very little mobile. Now we have
millions of readers on mobile. We had no video. Now we have an entire studio
and eight hours of live video a day. It was really a great opportunity for us
to achieve what we want much faster.
CAIRO REVIEW: One of the critiques of legacy media
is that a few giants controlled all the media. Is being part of AOL a risk for
the Huffington Post’s brand of
journalism?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: What is great is that we have
maintained our identity. We have been running the Huffington Post as stand-alone within AOL. All our international
editions have maintained that HuffPost DNA.
CAIRO REVIEW: How is your profitability?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We don’t split up the Huffington Post in terms of P & L
[profits and losses] because it is part of AOL. But we have done a lot of great
things in the advertising front, with native advertising, with sponsored
sections. There are a lot of innovative things.
CAIRO REVIEW: Can the legacy media survive in
the Digital Age? Did you read the New
York Times internal innovation report? Can the New York Times survive.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Absolutely. Totally. It is just a
matter of how much they innovate online. The
New York Times has done some great things, including on the multimedia
front, like the “Snow Fall” [project] that they did last year. I think there is
still something in our human DNA that loves print. It is not just because of my
age. Even my daughters who are millennials, they love buying magazines, they
read books. So all these predictions that print is dead have been proven wrong.
Every time something new is invented we think it will completely supplant the
old. We thought television would supplant movies. It hasn’t. We thought digital
would supplant live events. Far from it. Live events are more popular than
ever. In the same way, the web will not supplant print.
CAIRO REVIEW: Give the New York Times some advice.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: What they are doing is good: this
convergence between what they are doing in print and doing more and more
online. A lot of their writers now blog, they tweet, they use social media.
CAIRO REVIEW: What are your plans for the Huffington Post?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We are launching HuffPost in Arabic in May. We are
launching in Australia. We are looking at where we are going to be launching
next. We will have fifteen international editions. The goal is to keep
expanding.
CAIRO REVIEW: What is the journalistic
rationale and business rationale for that?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Journalistically, we are a global
media company. So we want to be around the world. These editions also act as
bureaus. Let’s say when there is an election in the United Kingdom, our UK
reporters take the lead in the coverage. When there is a World Cup in Brazil,
our Brazilian reporters take the lead. There is more and more global
collaboration. We have a very complex translation system, so stories are
quickly translated. On the business front, these are all JVs [joint ventures],
commercial partnerships, which makes it easier for us to move faster. They are
all fifty-fifty partnerships with major media companies, whether it is Le Monde in France, or El País in Spain.
CAIRO REVIEW: What is the aim of Huffington Post in Arabic?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: It is a great opportunity both to
tell the story of all the problems and the crises, but also to tell all the
positive stories and good things in the Arab World, which so often are lost in
the coverage of the violence and the crises.
CAIRO REVIEW: I understand that you are going to
operate out of London rather than an Arab capital. Is there a risk for
contributors from the Arab World?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We don’t think that way.
CAIRO REVIEW: An advantage of the legacy media,
publications such as the New York Times,
is that readers can go there for a good grounding in what they need to know. In
the digital era there is a cacophony of information and voices. How does the
reader find the truth in all this?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Earning the trust of readers is
key. At the Huffington Post, we pride
ourselves in having a whole standards process, having our editors and reporters
trained in fact checking and verification. We have earned our readers’ trust.
But that happens gradually. Obviously when you first emerge, the reader has to
test you.
CAIRO REVIEW: Does the cacophony of information and voices in the digital media
world today leave the public confused and democracy diminished?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Quite the opposite.
Our changing media world has the potential to inform the public more than
ever before and also strengthen democracy. People are tired of being talked at.
They want to be talked with. The online world is now a global conversation,
with millions of new people pulling up a seat at the table every
day—indeed, nearly three billion people will join the Internet community by
2020. And new media and social technologies have created an explosion of
ways for people to connect with the content they value. These connections
have fueled revolutions, caused giant corporations to roll back policies, and
brands to engage with consumers in totally new ways. People have gone from searching
for information and data to searching for meaning, often by trying to make a
difference in the lives of others. For all these reasons and more I
believe we are living in a golden age of journalism for news consumers.
CAIRO REVIEW: How do you evaluate the performance of the mainstream traditional
media in the United States today?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: The traditional media too often
suffer from ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]. They are far too quick to
drop a story, even a good one, so eager are they to move on to the next big
thing. Online journalists, meanwhile, tend to have OCD
[Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder]—we chomp down on a story and stick
with it, refusing to move on until we've gotten down to the marrow. But the
larger point is that the never-very-useful division between "old
media" and "new media" has become
increasingly blurred. Digital and traditional media have a great deal to
learn from each other—and the evidence is all around us that they are learning
from each other. Increasingly, purely online news operations like the Huffington
Post are engaging in investigative journalism. And mainstream traditional
operations are adopting more and more of the digital tools that can bring in
the community to make it part of the creation of journalism, through reports
from the ground, through video, through Twitter feeds, through all the new
media available to us. There will, of course, always be mistakes, or reporting
that’s not skeptical enough of sources or the government. But now there are
many more outlets and voices that will point that out and course-correct the
story.
CAIRO REVIEW: What are the prospects for better election coverage in the 2016
presidential election year? Is it political journalism that is broken, or
politics itself?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Those who represent us—and those
who want to represent us—are plagued by short-term thinking, and obsessed with
fundraising. But the media bear plenty of responsibility for the
diminished conversation. Especially during presidential campaigns, our
media culture is locked in the “Perpetual Now,” constantly chasing ephemeral
scoops that last only seconds and that most often don’t matter or have any
impact in the first place, even for the brief moments that they’re “exclusive.”
This was the jumping-off point for a great piece by
HuffPost's Michael Calderone about
the effect that social media have had on 2012 campaign coverage. "In a
media landscape replete with Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and a myriad of other
digital, broadcast and print sources," he wrote, "nothing is too
inconsequential to be made consequential. Political junkies, political
operatives and political reporters consume most of this dross, and in this
accelerated, 24/7 news cycle, a day feels like a week, with the afternoon's
agreed-upon media narrative getting turned on its head by the evening's debate.
Candidates rise, fall, and rise again, all choreographed to the rat-a-tat
background noise of endless minutiae."
CAIRO REVIEW: How do you size up your favorite new media start-ups: ProPublica, BuzzFeed, Vice, First Look Media, or others?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We really are living in a
golden age of journalism for news consumers. And there's no shortage of
great journalism being done—including by all the outlets you name—and there's
no shortage of people hungering for it. And there are many
different business models being tried to connect the former with
the latter. The truth is that there are going to be more and more great digital
media players, sites that create more engagement in ways that are good for
all of us. So I welcome all of them.