The Huffington Post founder's long and varied career has reach its summit in a $315m deal with AOL, writes LARA MARLOWE
IN A business deal presented as a triumph for new, internet-based media, Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born American socialite, author and commentator, has sold the Huffington Post website, which she co-launched in 2005 with $2 million in seed capital, to America Online (AOL) for $315 million, of which $300 million is to be paid in cash and $15 million in AOL shares.
Huffington will be the president and editor-in-chief of the newly created Huffington Post Media Group.
The Huffington Post is an easy-to-navigate news aggregator that provides links to newspaper reports from the New York Times, Washington Postand other so-called old media or "MSM" (mainstream media) often scorned by Huffington. Her politically liberal website combines blogs from an army of unpaid bloggers with borrowed reporting and accords a great deal of importance to celebrities, many of whom are Huffington's friends.
The Huffington Post had 25 million unique visitors in December. Combined with AOL, the new group claims it will have 117 million unique visitors each month in the US and 279 million worldwide.
AOL has been losing money on its original internet access service, but has invested recently in websites such as Mapquest, Politics Daily, the cinema-booking site Moviefone and the technology blogs Engadget and TechCrunch. It also has a highly developed video section and owns a network of 800 local news services across the US called Patch.com.
Huffington built the HuffPo around the cult of her own personality. In a blog posted on her website at one minute past midnight yesterday, she recounted her meeting with AOL’s chairman Tim Armstrong in New York last November, where he spoke on a panel aptly entitled Digital Darwinism. The two “were practically finishing each other’s sentences”, as they discussed the future of their companies, Huffington wrote.
The deal was signed at the Super Bowl on Sunday. “It was my first Super Bowl – an incredibly exciting backdrop that mirrored my excitement about the merger and the future ahead,” Huffington gushed. The merger “will have a multiplier effect. As Tim and I have been saying . . . 1 + 1 = 11. This moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet.”
The deal marks the apogee of Huffington’s remarkable ambition. Now 60, she was born in Athens and emigrated to Britain at the age of 16. Her father, Konstantinos Stassinopoulos, was a journalist and management consultant. At Cambridge, she presided over the Cambridge Union Society and earned a degree in economics.
In London, she lived with the late Timescommentator Bernard Levin. In The Female Woman, a retort to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, she called the women's movement "repulsive" and said it would benefit "only the lives of women with strong lesbian tendencies".
She moved to the US in 1980. Six years later, she married Michael Huffington, a petroleum heir who became a US congressman and deputy assistant secretary of defence. The marriage ended in divorce, after which Huffington revealed he was bisexual.
In the mid-1990s, Arianna Huffington became a syndicated columnist and ardent support of the right-wing Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Huffington began distancing herself from the Republicans after they lost the 1998 midterm elections. She challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger for the California governor’s office in 2003. By the 2004 presidential campaign, when she backed John Kerry, she was firmly identified with the Democratic Party. She has since become a champion of progressive causes.
The Huffington Post’s refusal to pay its bloggers has been likened to slavery. When Huffington’s 12th book was released 18 months ago, Isaac Chotiner published an in-depth analysis of her life’s work in the New Republic, calling her “a personification of the hyperactive up-to-the-nanosecond news-and-opinion universe of the web”. One was struck, he said, “by the discrepancy between the mediocrity of her work and the skill with which she consolidated her fame”.
Huffington has been accused repeatedly of plagiarism. Maria Callas’s biographer Gerald Fitzgerald reached an out-of-court financial settlement with her after claiming she copied his material in her 1981 biography of Callas. The art history professor Lydia Gasman said Huffington stole 20 years of her work for a book on Picasso, published in 1988. In 2006, the actor George Clooney complained that Huffington assembled quotes from other sources and published them online as a blog written by Clooney for her website.
The hype surrounding this deal was reminiscent of a much bigger one, the $350 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2000. The companies separated in 2009, and that merger is now taught in business schools as the worst transaction of all time.
Lara Marlowe is Washington Correspondent