Arianna Huffington sweeps into the room at the Time-Life building in midtown Manhattan. She is tall and statuesque and waves a mane of chestnut hair above cheekbones so sharp you could hang a jacket on them. She does not look around. She does not need to. Everyone is looking at her. Hurricane Arianna is hitting New York. She blows through the room, meeting and greeting the powerful Manhattanites gathered there to debate who should be Time's Person of the Year. It has probably occurred to a few of them that it just might be her.
At the party she is a social whirlwind, but she is also the harbinger of a very different sort of storm. For Arianna has become the unlikely face of the Internet revolution that is sweeping through the world's media, tearing down the walls of old-media fortresses (including Time). Her current affairs blog, the Huffington Post, just 18 months old, is now one of the world's most influential media outlets. "We hold the mainstream media's feet to the fire," she says, smiling the certain smile of the true believer.
To watch Arianna at work is to see a human blog in action. Each air kiss seems like the click of a computer's mouse, each handshake a link to another potential blogger in an ever-growing network of movers and shakers. No wonder she has prospered in the world of the Web.
PHTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Every moment of downtime, while she is being made up for an interview or driven to a meeting, is spent in online communication. Arianna is permanently clamped to her Blackberry. It is this high-octane power networking that has allowed the Post to gather the greatest roster of celebrity names in the blogosphere, from media stars such as Tina Brown and Norman Mailer to Hollywood figures like John Cusack, Tim Robbins, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin and Larry David. There are also politicians such as John Kerry and Gary Hart and, amazingly, not one of these contributors gets paid.
Here and now, as Time executives sip mineral water and dine on tiny canapes, Arianna is in the inner sanctum of the enemy: Time magazine is the perfect symbol of much of the world's old media. And Arianna is having a ball. She even holds out an olive branch to the many newspapermen and magazine writers in the room, kindly declaring that she still reads them — "At least five newspapers a day," she says. "The argument that the old media will simply die off is becoming obsolete. Honestly, there is room for both of us. Both of us are here to stay."
But the very fact that Arianna feels she needs to make such a statement tells you everything about the power dynamic these days, about how far the revolution has already come. She is seeking to reassure the great and good of Manhattan's old media world that they still have a future.
Later that night, back in her plush New York hotel just off Central Park, Arianna looks as fresh as when the day began. It is nearly midnight but she is still enthusing about the potential of the Internet. "There is so much to discover. I feel so comfortable with blogging as a medium."
She has good reason to feel comfortable. The Post is now the fifth most popular site in the world. It shapes the debate of American politics and gives Arianna real power and prestige. This year she made Time magazine's list of the 100 most important people in the world, and next year she looks likely to climb the list.
Nothing happens these days that does not happen on the Web. In Britain, America and across the world newspapers face declining sales and falling revenue as the advertising industry moves online. All Britain's major newspapers are ploughing huge resources into their Web sites, even as they scratch their heads wondering how to make them profitable. The whole landscape is shifting. There are now 115 million MySpace members. Google paid an astonishing US$1.65 billion for YouTube. As the economy changes beyond recognition, these companies are shaping up to become the new Wal-Mart and General Motors.
Politics is changing, too. America's midterm elections were largely defined by the Internet, blogging and YouTube. Just ask the Virginian Republican ex-Senator George Allen. He offhandedly called one Indian American political activist a "macaca" (a racist slur) — then found a video of the remark posted on YouTube and highlighted by blogs like the Post. It triggered the collapse of his campaign and the destruction of a political career many Republicans believed was headed to the White House.
At the Time meeting she is involved in a public spat with Brian Williams, news anchor of NBC, an old-media icon who represents a world where the family sat down in the evening to have the news read to them by a man only half-jokingly nicknamed the Voice of God. Arianna is the opposite. He despairingly berates the new world of blogging, YouTube and Google. "It could destroy us. We are choosing cat-juggling videos over well-researched newscasts," he says. "It is de-Americanising us." Arianna rises to the bait. "I am not sure what universe Brian inhabits, but it is not mine," she says.
The Huffington Post offices are in a converted warehouse deep in the heart of New York's trendy SoHo. The news editor, Katharine Zaleski, a striking blonde, is not shy about where she thinks the Huffington Post is going. "We would like to be the future of news," she says simply; her tone suggests that it is only a matter of time. The Huffington Post's mix of comment, news and personal blogging gets 3 million unique visitors a month and more than 30 million page views.
The real secret of the Post's success is not its star names but its army of citizen bloggers (including Arianna herself) who write freewheeling posts on a variety of subjects. They are men like Bob Cesca, a Philadelphia-based animator. "We can write whatever we want. There's no real censorship. This is raw, unfiltered power," Cesca says. Though there are conservative commentators, the tone is overwhelmingly liberal and it has already claimed some notable scalps. It was the Post that drove the Judy Miller scandal at the New York Times, panning her pre-Iraq war coverage of Saddam's non- existent weapons of mass destruction.
Whenever a big story breaks, the bloggers of the Post run with it, shaping the mainstream media's perception before they have published a word on paper. The Post's power stems from the secret of all blogging's success: increasingly it is interpretation, not facts, that matters.
Still less than two years old, the Post has not so much proven its naysayers wrong as swallowed them whole. Take Nikki Finke, one of the most prolific media writers in Los Angeles. When the Huffington Post was launched she echoed the sentiments of many with a scathing review. She called the Post "a bomb" after the site's opening day. Now, Finke herself blogs on the Huffington Post.
Arianna Stassinopoulos was born in Athens on July 15, 1950. Her mother, Elli, who Arianna says has been the "greatest influence" on her life, left her unfaithful father partly at the young Arianna's instigation. "When she left my dad because of his massive philandering, she had no money, no job, no formal education. She was fearless. That was the kind of woman she was," Arianna tells me.
Her mother's inspiration gave Arianna the courage to apply to Cambridge University in England after seeing a picture of it in a magazine. It paid off. Arianna arrived in the UK burdened with an accent people still mistake for Hungarian. She left as head of the Cambridge Union, and a society beauty. She had also become something of a media star, writing The Female Woman, a best-selling response to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. But there was one thing missing: the great love of her life, English journalist and writer Bernard Levin, would not marry her. She had had enough of Britain, though she remembers her years here as formative: 'They were incredibly important times. I got my education in speaking out at Cambridge, at the Union. It is where I discovered both my heart and my mind. I learned how to argue. I apply that now in my blog,' she says.
So Arianna launched her first great reinvention. Aged 30, she moved to America, landing in New York at the beginning of the city's gilded decade, the 80s. She conquered the city, and became Manhattan's premier It girl, appearing on the cover of New York magazine.
Then came marriage to Michael Huffington, an oil billionaire so reclusive only five people knew his phone number. Huffington had a modest political career in the Republican party which gave Arianna a taste for power and conservatism. She signed up to the right-wing revolution headed by Republican speaker Newt Gingrich.
Then, it all changed. First, she divorced Huffington — who then revealed he was gay. Second, she began to drift to the left, just as the Republicans began to veer to the right. "I was always a socially liberal Republican," she says now. "The party has changed so much now. But I also realized that corporate America was never going to step up to the plate and help society's disadvantaged by itself. Other people had to force it or do it themselves."
It all came to a head in typically over-the-top fashion. Arianna began appearing as the conservative pundit in a US television show called Strange Bedfellows, literally sharing a bed with the leftist comedian Al Franken as they debated issues. She became friends with Franken, who was instrumental in her conversion to liberalism and, in due course, entry into the world of American leftist politics. This, among other things, brought her fame. Her palatial home in California became a salon for every shade of liberal mover and shaker.
From this base, Arianna tried to launch her own political career, campaigning against Arnold Schwarzenegger to become governor of California in the bizarre election of 2003. She dubbed the contest the Hybrid vs. the Hummer. The Hummer flattened her. "It was tough," she says, "but I also learnt an enormous amount: the double standards about women and speaking out. But from that failure came a new venture. People should embrace failure. Woman are so afraid to face failure."
And embrace it she did. From the ashes of political disaster was born the Huffington Post. Arianna, too, was reborn. In her latest and most powerful guise: Internet media mogul.
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