"Communicating is people's new form of entertainment"

A 2008 cartoon in The New Yorker showed Arianna Huffington strangling a man dressed up like a newspaper. In the years since then, many things have happened and many things have changed. The Huffington Post met with huge success; its founder sold it to AOL for $315 million (227 million euros) in March of this year. Huffington, who now tops the lists of the US' most influential communicators, has just embarked on a global expansion of the online newspaper through alliances with traditional media outlets - a first step was a recent agreement with French newspaper Le Monde. She also joined the board of EL PAÍS five months ago.

These days, Huffington can be found lugging her four overworked BlackBerries across Europe. Even though she cannot go unnoticed in her country of residence (she was born in Greece in 1950, but calls Los Angeles and New York home), when she is in Madrid, few people outside journalistic circles have heard of a website that bears her former husband's surname. But Arianna is ready to change all that.

Question. You're here in Spain after visiting France, Italy and Turkey. It seems like you are on a quest to conquer the world. What are your expectations for The Huffington Post?

Answer. This is a time when many things are coming together. We've been living in an interconnected world for quite a while, but in the midst of the economic crisis it seems more interconnected than ever, and it is a great occasion for The Huffington Post to go global. This was my dream but I never had the resources before. One of the great opportunities of the merger with AOL is that we now have the resources to accelerate this strategy.

Q. Does the strategy involve local partners, or are you also considering going solo, as you are doing in Britain?

A. When we started thinking about global expansion, we weren't sure which way we would go, but a few months ago I went to Paris to start talks, and I realized that it was necessary to anchor the site to each country's roots, to the culture of each place, using local news editors. We will provide the technology, the model, and what we have learned about creating online communities and building reader loyalty. The combination of this with local teams is what will make it work. In the case of The Huffington Post in Britain, the language is the same so that makes it easier.

Q. How easy do you think it will be to transfer The Huffington Post's working style to journalists outside your ambit?

A.What we do, even when we hire journalists in the US, is make sure they're what we call amphibian, meaning they can walk on land and swim in the sea. We need this type of amphibian journalist for the future, because we want them to embrace the great traditions of classic journalism in terms of accuracy, fact checking, impartiality, the search for truth and impact, while also being comfortable with the new rules of the road, real-time publishing, and technology that allows for interaction or reader participation. And not everyone is ready for both sides.

Q. What's next after Le Monde?

A. We want The Huffington Post to be in Brazil, Italy, Turkey and Spain. These are the most immediate projects. Later we will move on to Germany, Australia, New Zealand... It's a global plan.

Q. It's unlikely to be easy. Though you are well known in the US, in countries such as Spain, The Huffington Post is not known to a lot of people beyond the journalism community.

A. True, this is why we want to reach agreements with established brands and also create an addictive online experience, which is a combination of many things - a magnetic website design and the ability to create loyalty. Everything so that our readers know that we're not just a place to consume news, but to share it, to contribute. Rather than the end of the conversation, it's the beginning.

Q. In its six years online, how has The Huffington Post changed?

A. We have learned a lot along the way by trying to understand our readers and by listening to them. Our process is very interactive. We don't consider anything to be a finished product. A key thing is that our tech team sits down with the editors. The technical director is in the middle of the newsroom, and journalists and developers/designers are permanently interacting.

Q. Agreements with traditional media will allow you to gain relevance more quickly, but you'll be competing for advertising.

A. We see it like this: even very successful websites such as Le Monde know that they need to expand their audience, and The Huffington Post will give them the chance to reach more people. The Huffington Post's combination of highbrow and popular, its capacity for getting people hooked and for adding relevance to other people's content by aggregating them to our site will help these media grow. Either you expand or you die. We can be a test lab for experimentation and later implement that knowledge.

Q. The mood in most newsrooms is not exactly optimistic regarding the future. Some journalists feel that their jobs are under threat, and others view their work as being pirated by products such as yours. What do you say to these journalists?

A. The new technologies have changed the rules of the game that journalists are competing in, and like Heraclitus said, you can't go in the same river twice. Even if we look back, and feel that there was a golden age of journalism, that's not something that can be recovered in the same way. What can we do to uphold the virtues of traditional journalism? You have to get in the river, and recognize this new reality. It's not about adopting formulas that do not fit in with traditional journalism. I don't believe in an uncivilized website. I think the difference lies between the website's adolescent moment and its adult period. The first consisted of eating lots of junk food, going to bed late and screaming a lot. That has changed. We recognize the importance of editors - they will be increasingly important as filters for a cacophony of voices, and more and more readers want what is happening in the world to be filtered for them. But they want that filtering to be done by a number of sources. They don't want to just listen to a group of journalists who are the self-proclaimed voices of authority. The reader also wants Twitter or Facebook messages to be filtered, whether in connection with the Arab Spring or an earthquake.

Q. Your model has been criticized for two main reasons: that it is partially based on the aggregation of other people's content and that bloggers who write for The Huffington Post are not paid.

A. You have to keep in mind that The Huffington Post and similar new media companies are a combination of two things: we are journalism companies with professionals - in the case of The Huffington Post, including the local Patch sites, we have approximately 1,400 journalists who are pretty well paid. We are also a platform that offers distribution to thousands of people who meet our quality standards. We don't let just anyone in. But if you do make the cut, whether you are well known or not, you can be on The Huffington Post platform. That way you can reach a wide audience, in our case enormous, thanks to our union with AOL. Comments are moderated, so that you join a quality conversation. Whether they wish to blog or not is their choice. Nobody is going tell them to blog, there are no expectations, no deadlines. Many people don't understand it because it is a new model, they don't understand why there are people who keep blogs for free, or why they update Wikipedia without charging for it, or their Facebook wall. Communicating is people's new form of entertainment. It is a new source of self-fulfillment. Nobody asks why there are people who spend hours watching bad TV for free. We still haven't adjusted to the new reality of how people want to live their lives.

As for aggregation, even if I had an unlimited budget I would still do it. It is a service to my readers. If I am committed to showing the best, some stories will be produced by us and others we will pick and filter from other sites.