Interaction with Arianna Huffington, co-founder HuffingtonPost.com

Posted on November 21, 2007
Filed Under Interviews / Leaders, Blogs,Podcasts & Other Resources |

Arianna Huffington needs no introduction – as co-founder and editor of The Huffington Post, Ariana has created a place for herself in the short history of new media, giving traditional media a run for their money in the process.

I got an opportunity to listen to her and subsequently interact too at Ad:Tech in New York which I covered. Excerpts from her talk/ my interview:

Should a blog or a site focus on a single theme to appeal to a specific audience or be everything to everyone?
We started as a political blog, but realised even the most passionate of our readers have other interests prompting us to launch more verticals. The key is also to make your platform interactive to get them to spend more time on the site. Last month alone we had 250,000 comments. Depending on your business model, both specialist and general can work.

But you moderate comments – is that acceptable to your audience? Does it affect the social elements of the site?
We do so, but in a manner so as not to disrupt conversations. We strive to bring the best of traditional and new media together: On the one side, all content is suitably edited and checked for errors just like in a newspaper, but we also have the interactive elements to make the platform more social. And then social networking happens even on a subject like poetry. Humans have many dimensions, and if you engage with them, it is a great experience.

What other elements do you believe make a news blog or a site tick?
You have to aggregate content 24/7 from various news sources. There is no such thing as it’s my content or yours – that is the old model. Share your content and people will come. But this is something difficult for traditional players like Time Warner to accept. The other element is to bring on the most interesting voices to your site – we have 1,800 bloggers on our site currently. We even invited Benazir Bhutto and she agreed – we are bringing newsmakers to the site.