about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
huffingtonpost.com
Primary Twitter:
@HuffingtonPost

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Huffington Post is an American news and blog network run by author and political activist Arianna Huffington and owned by AOL.

The Huffington Post, commonly called HuffPost or HuffPo, was the 6th-largest news site in the United States as of April 2011 and attracted 40 million monthly unique visitors in January 2012. The site has seen steady, significant growth since its launch in 2005.

HuffPost was founded by Huffington and Ken Lerer with $10 million of startup funding as a conversational group blog and aggregator. It has often been seen as liberal alternative to the conservative news aggregator The Drudge Report.

While HuffPost began with a more strictly political focus — it has also invited a variety of celebrities and public figures to be guest and semi-regular columnists — the site now includes more than 60 verticals, including sections devoted to such topics as technology, sports, business, environmental issues, college life, food, divorce, and, most recently, science. HuffPost started its local sites with a site for Detroit and began moving into international sites in 2011. As of 2014 it had 10 international sites, including sites in Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, North Africa, the U.K., and Germany, with more than half of its traffic coming from outside the U.S. It also partnered with Honolulu Civil Beat to launch HuffPost Hawaii in 2013. In 2014, it announced it would replace its world section with a new site called the World Post, founded by Huffington and billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen.

HuffPost has an iPad magazine, launched in 2012, that was initially 99 cents per issue but was quickly made free.

HuffPost has a streaming news video operation, founded in 2012, called HuffPost Live. In 2013, it reached a deal to air six hours a day of HuffPost Live on Mark Cuban’s cable channel AXS TV.

The site initially received tepid reviews and has been criticized as shallow, predictably liberal, breathless, sexist, plagiaristic, and a parasitic.

The latter charge, of aggregating content from other news outlets with no compensation, has prompted the fiercest debate. Several critics have made that accusation, including top editors at the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. HuffPost and other aggregators have also been vigorously defended by digital media advocates, as well as by Huffington herself.

HuffPost had about 100 employees at the time it was bought by AOL, a number that had grown to nearly 500 employees by mid-2012. Much of its content comes from thousands of unpaid bloggers, a practice that has repeatedly drawn fire since its founding and particularly after its February 2011 acquisition by AOL. Huffington and others at HuffPost have countered that writing for the popular site gives bloggers a platform they wouldn’t have otherwise.

HuffPost began a locally-focused initiative in 2008, starting with a Chicago edition and eventually expanding into New York, Los Angeles, and Denver.

The site has developed an active community, drawing millions of comments per month (and 250 million total as of May 2013), as well as hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans and millions of Twitter followers. Its Facebook community has been measured as the most active of any publisher’s page, and its content was the most shared of any publisher in 2014. CEO Eric Hippeau has described HuffPost as “one part social network, one part news content site.” As of 2012, it had 13 employees in social and community engagement, plus 30 in comment moderation. In 2013, it introduced Conversations, which allow users to isolate individual comment subthreads and view them on a separate page. HuffPost also ended its longstanding practice of allowing anonymous comments, requiring a Facebook login for users to comments.

In 2009, HuffPost launched HuffPost Social News, a partnership with Facebook that integrates the Facebook Connect API to allow its readers to recommend and share news with friends. The project has helped increase traffic significantly. In 2010, the site launched HuffPost Badges, which rewarded users for engagement within the HuffPost community. It has also launched Twitter editions of several of its section pages. HuffPost was also one of the initial partners of the publisher program of the social reading app Zite. It has also opened its own HuffPost Pollster API to allow developers to use its poll data, and has a HuffPost Labs website for its experimental products.

Despite its significant traffic and growing revenue, HuffPost has lost money for most of its existence. It did not become profitable for the first time until 2009. It was marginally profitable on $30 million in annual revenues when it was bought by AOL in early 2011 and increased its revenues to $40 million by the end of the year. By 2013, it was reported to be losing money again under AOL, and continued to lose money in 2014. In 2014, 15% of HuffPo’s direct ad sales came from native advertising.

Original reporting

The site has also expanded into original news reporting. Huffington hired a political editor in 2006, and in 2007, it launched OffTheBus, a citizen-driven journalism project that covered the 2008 presidential campaign. The site received particular publicity for reporting Barack Obama’s comments about “bitter” voters at a San Francisco fundraiser. After the election ended, HuffPost began employing a White House reporter. Its Washington bureau, which includes former Washington Post reporter (and Nieman Watchdog deputy editor) Dan Froomkin, also includes dedicated Congressional reporters. OffTheBus was relaunched for the 2012 presidential campaign, and HuffPost also collaborated with ProPublica on an investigative project into political ad spending during the campaign.

HuffPost also launched the nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund in 2009. The fund has an annual budget of $2 million and aims to produce stories that can be distributed to other media outlets. It also uses freelance and crowdsourced contributions in its reporting. The site’s reporting projects — both investigative and otherwise — have won it praise, though the Investigative Fund has also drawn criticism for serving the HuffPost more than society.

In 2014, outgoing executive business editor and global editor Peter Goodman wrote a memo arguing that HuffPost’s commitment to in-depth reporting had waned, replaced by a desire for traffic and more measurable productivity.

The site won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for a 10-part series on wounded veterans.

In 2013, the site gave each of its reporters a blog for their beat.

Sale to AOL

In February 2011, AOL purchased HuffPost for $315 million in cash and stock, furthering AOL CEO Tim Armstrong‘s vision of reshaping the company into a news and content titan. Huffington was named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which includes not only HuffPost, but also all of AOL’s existing editorial properties, including Engadget, TechCrunch, and Patch. In 2012, Huffington’s role was scaled back to oversight only of HuffPost, which by that time included more than 30 other AOL properties.

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Dec. 19, 2018 / Ken Doctor
Newsonomics: 18 lessons for the news business from 2018 — We live in transgressive, new-Orwellian times. Fact has been subverted by forces beyond our imagination, both newly minted and old school. Truth, elusive truth, is now in the mind of the subscriber. Yes, it is subscriber...
April 4, 2018 / Alan Soon
Coconuts, a fast-growing, cities-focused network of sites in Asia, takes a hard right into paid memberships — Coconuts, born as a network of city-focused sites centered around English-language audiences in Southeast Asia, has now been around for seven years. Its content, often irreverent, often derived from trending topics on so...
Nov. 17, 2017 / Ricardo Bilton
Bad news from Mashable, BuzzFeed, and Vice shows times are rough for ad-supported digital media — Thursday was a rough day for digital media. Within hours, a series of reports, some unofficial and others confirmed, underscored a bitter reality that’s become increasingly harder to avoid: Not even the biggest dig...
Sept. 7, 2017 / Ken Doctor
Newsonomics: Mort to Ferro: Take My Paper, Please! (and a few other headlines about the New York Daily News) — For much of the winter and spring, Michael Ferro was uncharacteristically quiet. Once he’d defeated Gannett’s hostile takeover attempt of his newly named Tronc, Ferro seemed to cease being the center of the n...
July 12, 2017 / Ricardo Bilton
With its Take Action newsletter, The Nation is giving readers ways to act on the stories they read — When it comes to politics, the first half of 2017 has given people plenty to protest. And while some have responded to current affairs by becoming more politically active, others, certain they can’t have an effect,...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: August 14, 2014.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
Explore: NewsTilt
NewsTilt logo

NewsTilt was a short-lived content network built around individual journalists. The site was launched in April 2010 by Nathan Chong and Paul Biggar as part of NewsLabs, a project of the noted startup incubator Y Combinator. Both NewsLabs and NewsTilt were shut down in June 2010. The site intended to create a network to serve…

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »