When It Comes to New Media, Look at How Someone Named Huffington Started the First "Internet Newspaper"

The Huffington Post, which she founded in 2005, was not a print outlet gone digital. It was an internet media company in the true sense.

Who she is: Arianna Huffington (1950- ), founder of The Huffington Post, "the first newspaper of the internet," and an author.

The curiosity: while traditional media still had no idea how to get onto the internet, she was already using data and technology to dig out and present what readers most wanted to know.

Arianna Huffington is about to leave The Huffington Post, the outlet she built herself — in its 11th year, and five years after AOL bought it for $350 million.

Huffington announced the news on August 11. She is 66 this year. But she has no plans to retire. After stepping down as editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, she will throw herself into her own startup, Thrive Global, which sells wellness content and services.

To say Huffington's exit marks the beginning of the end for The Huffington Post may be alarmist. But she did create the outlet's most glorious stretch, and this "newspaper" became one of the first internet media outlets in the true sense.

Citizen journalism, blog-style commentary, user-generated content, search engine optimization — Huffington, a Greek who came to the United States at 20 to make her way, pushed all of these things along. They look unremarkable now. At the time they were ahead of their era.

You could say she was the first to explore internet media — a print edition moved onto a screen does not count.

From the day it was founded in 2005, The Huffington Post invited ordinary people, not professional reporters, to cover and write about public affairs (it now has a large editorial staff of its own, of course). That gave the public a shared platform for what they saw and what they thought. Next to today's dense thicket of WeChat official accounts, it let loose a broader kind of energy, because everything on it was open and you did not have to subscribe to anything one account at a time.

Because of that, you could also say The Huffington Post freed readers from the authority traditional media had always held, and let anyone become a reporter, a commentator and a publisher of news.

Huffington should be pleased. This "newspaper" with no physical form now has more than 800 employees worldwide and 15 international editions, posts close to 1,900 articles a day across the site, and draws 100 million unique visitors a month.

In 2011, AOL bought The Huffington Post for $350 million, $100 million more than Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Post in 2013. In 2012, on the strength of war correspondent David Wood's "Beyond the Battlefield" series, The Huffington Post became the first outlet publishing only online to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Arianna Huffington herself was never a "media person" in the traditional sense. "Businesswoman," in fact, may describe her better than "editor-in-chief."

What you might not expect is that her address book holds more than 19,000 celebrities and public figures — and back when The Huffington Post was still unknown, she knew how to turn those connections into content people wanted to read. Huffington is also a political activist through and through, and that identity mattered to how The Huffington Post was born and how it grew.

Which brings us to Michael Huffington. Her ex-husband served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan and later as a Republican congressman.

Michael Huffington met her when she was 35. They married a year later and stayed married until 1997. Their lives went separate ways, but his political connections and influence stayed with her for life.

In 2003, Arianna Huffington ran for governor of California as an independent. She pulled out of the race against Arnold Schwarzenegger and the rest of the field, with support of just 0.55 percent in the end. She had run over the strong objections of her two children, and the result looked like a huge failure — a challenge to everything she had accumulated in the first half of her life. That accumulation included leaving her homeland behind.

At 16, Huffington left Greece to read economics at Girton College, Cambridge, where she served as president of the Cambridge Union, the university's celebrated debating society. After graduating she became a guest on the BBC, delivering political opinions and commentary on television and radio. In 1973, at 23, she published The Female Woman, a criticism of the currents running through the women's liberation movement. In 1980 she moved to the United States, where she helped her then-husband Michael Huffington run for Congress. Before she met him, she had been the life partner of Bernard Levin, Britain's sharpest journalist and political commentator of the 1970s and 1980s.

All of it laid the ground for the paper she would later found.

The year after she lost the governor's race — May 2005 — Huffington founded The Huffington Post with Kenneth Lerer (who later started the fund Lerer Hippeau Ventures) and Jonah Peretti (who started BuzzFeed in 2006), and became its editor-in-chief. It began as a political news site built partly on the model of the Drudge Report, the conservative news-aggregation site founded in 1995. The writers came from Huffington's friends in politics and the media, and her friends in Hollywood sometimes dropped in with an entertaining story.

The mainstream press of the day gave the site called The Huffington Post no chance. "Judging by the first-day version of the site, this is a giant, overblown celebrity blog. The Madonna of media-politics [meaning Huffington] has gone too far this time," wrote Nikki Finke of the Los Angeles Times.

"Good luck to you bloggers at The Huffington Post. Once you've recovered from going belly up, I'll go back and read these pieces seriously — though don't expect much sympathy from me," wrote Jack Shafer of Slate, the American political commentary site founded in 1996, on the day The Huffington Post launched.

No one could have guessed how violently the story would reverse between traditional media and new media a few years later.

At the time The Huffington Post looked like nothing more than a blog. Blogs had appeared in the 1990s and caught on around 2001, and the internet filled up with articles teaching people how to write one. By 2004 blogging had entered the mainstream as a personal platform where political figures and commentators published their views. Only after 2004 did the news-aggregation blog arrive — sites like The Huffington Post.

As for pushing the idea that anyone can be a media outlet, you cannot leave out the power of social media. But in the year The Huffington Post was born, Facebook had been online for a year and YouTube had only just launched. Twitter would not exist for another year.

Perhaps it was the absence of any professional media training that became the key to what made The Huffington Post different. Before founding it and taking the editor's chair, Huffington had run only a site called AriannaOnline (essentially her own blog), worked as a political commentator and published books. She had never been a reporter.

From the start, Huffington told her staff to handle news short, fast and light. She hired a lot of writers and had them camp on mainstream media websites, summarizing and combining what different sites carried the moment news broke. Stay glued to what is hot, in other words, but pull together different angles and write in a way that is less "serious and proper" — all of it native to the internet.

If you have seen The Huffington Post's headlines you will understand this better. Unlike the serious, by-the-book headlines of traditional outlets such as The New York Times (whose website went up in 1995), the paper's headlines are light, familiar and sometimes sensational. Or put it this way: while most news sites were still guessing which headlines would land with readers, The Huffington Post was already using data analysis, search engine optimization and A/B testing — splitting users into two groups and showing each a different headline for the same story — to work out which headlines pulled hardest.

Roy Sekoff, a senior editor at The Huffington Post, once said: "Look at the news pages of Yahoo, Google or CNN. Take away the logos and the headlines all look about the same. But strip the name off The Huffington Post and you can still tell at a glance that it's us."

BuzzFeed, founded in 2006, and Business Insider, the blog-style business news site founded in 2009 — what these new outlets do with headlines, SEO and data mining all borrows, to some degree, from the groundwork The Huffington Post laid and the lessons it learned.

Huffington never dropped her interest in politics either. And political news, along with gossip of every kind, has always been popular subject matter in the United States.

In July 2007, The Huffington Post started a citizen-journalism project called "Off the Bus," recruiting volunteers from among ordinary readers to cover the 2008 presidential election. More than 300 people joined at the outset. They took interview questions drafted by Huffington Post editors, collected the answers, sent them back to the editors, and the results went into the paper's news database.

A year later the project had 7,500 volunteers, among them citizen journalists like Mayhill Fowler. Fowler found that Barack Obama, during the Democratic primary, had spoken dismissively of working-class voters in Pennsylvania, and that Bill Clinton, out campaigning for his wife Hillary, had snapped rudely at a reporter who had criticized him. Fowler exposed both, the public took notice, and both men apologized publicly.

Citizen journalism existed before The Huffington Post was born; it was already doing work in the 1988 U.S. election. We do not mean to take up the limits and the potential problems of this kind of reporting here. What needs saying now is what The Huffington Post contributed: it saw how convenient and how valuable the internet and information technology were, and it used them. The point of citizen journalism online is that it changed the rule by which information flowed downward, from the authorities to the "grassroots." In a way, it was also a challenge to journalistic professionalism. Today The Huffington Post leans on a large body of bloggers to keep up more than 700,000 pieces of content a year.

Close in spirit to citizen journalism was the weight Huffington put on reader comments. In 2007, the paper under her leadership rolled out a new "system" that invited readers whose comments drew the most likes to start a blog and write for The Huffington Post. Someone once counted 12,000-plus reader comments on the paper's most popular article.

Staff at The Huffington Post say they have never once seen Huffington browse the web on a computer. She usually reads only the stories colleagues recommend to her, on her iPhone, then sends and receives email on a separate BlackBerry. Huffington may not understand how social media works, but she knows how to hire. Her people share different content at different hours — pushing pieces like "Stop procrastinating and go to sleep" or "Turn off your phone's data" to The Huffington Post's Facebook page at 11 p.m., for instance. The paper now has about 8 million followers on Facebook and, measured by likes, shares and comments, ranks first among digital publishing platforms. Pushing the right content at the right hour is now a basic rule for content platforms and social media everywhere.

In 2011, The Huffington Post launched international editions, testing the idea in Canada and the U.K. and hiring editorial teams on the ground (there are 15 international editions now, including Spain, France, Japan and India). In 2012 it also started a video project, HuffPost Live, feeding readers around the world video news around the clock.

But the paper's golden age has passed too. In 2011 its traffic overtook The New York Times for the first time. After 2014 it fell sharply, from a peak of 126 million monthly unique visitors to 86 million in September 2015.

According to comScore figures cited by Digiday, since July 2015 The Huffington Post has gone from far ahead of both BuzzFeed and The New York Times to behind BuzzFeed and roughly level with the Times.

The problems The Huffington Post faces are the problems many news sites face, including a loss of pull with young readers. In fact, although 45 percent of its readers are between 18 and 35, it still gets less attention from people in their 20s than BuzzFeed does. The data mining, search engine optimization and headline tuning the paper once did better than anyone are now the industry standard rather than an advantage.

It has also performed poorly on mobile. It put VR features on every platform, website and app, this July, but the app itself is ordinary and brings nothing new. Having concentrated on Facebook in the PC era of social media, The Huffington Post was slow to notice mobile social platforms like Snapchat, and missed its chance to move onto Snapchat Discover, the section Snapchat opens to media outlets.

In a way, The Huffington Post trained the public to take part in the news, and at the same time sharpened people's hunger for professional journalism — which is still where traditional media holds the advantage. The paper once hired a number of reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Vanity Fair, but reporters including Peter Goodman have left one after another.

On top of all these problems, discord in the management ranks made things worse.

In 2011, AOL bought The Huffington Post for $350 million. AOL then put Huffington at the helm of The Huffington Post Media Group, in charge of several content sites including the paper itself, Moviefone, TechCrunch and Engadget. But her way of managing soon collided with AOL's, and she began refusing to attend AOL leadership meetings. By April 2012, AOL had taken that authority back, and her remit returned to The Huffington Post alone.

The souring ran straight on into 2015. That June, Verizon completed its purchase of AOL. Before it closed, Huffington had gone through hard negotiations with Verizon over the paper's future and her own. In the end Verizon offered $100 million to fund The Huffington Post's operations, with Huffington staying on as editor-in-chief and keeping independent editorial authority. Under that agreement she was to serve as editor-in-chief and chair of The Huffington Post through 2019.

The August 11 departure notice tore up that piece of paper. "I thought I could be editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post and run my startup [meaning Thrive Global] at the same time," Huffington said in a statement. "Today it looks like that was an illusion."

A more plausible reason is the awkward spot The Huffington Post now sits in. Under AOL it was a strong asset, and the company treated it as one. Once AOL was folded into Verizon, the paper's importance eroded inside a far larger pile of assets. That weak position looked even less likely to turn around after Verizon announced recently that it would absorb Yahoo's core content business.

Huffington spent 11 years building a blog empire. She should know better than anyone that its golden age will not come again.

In 2007, after years of working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, without a break, she fainted at her desk at home. "If you're lying in a pool of blood in your office, that cannot be called success, however you look at it," she said later. After that year she began writing books about sleep, yoga and health, and argued often in public speeches for a balance between work and life. That became the start of the new venture, Thrive Global.

Few people know that in the 1980s Huffington published two biographies, one on the life of Picasso, the other on the Greek-American soprano Maria Callas. People have waited for the day this prolific author writes her own story.

"Don't you think writing an autobiography is like saying your life is basically over?" she said in a 2008 interview with The New Yorker.

Cover image from startribune.com, nyoobserver