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.
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.
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