Arianna Huffington

Cofounder of the Huffington Postand founding CEO of Thrive Global

• Born: July 15, 1950
• Place of Birth: Athens, Greece

Primary Company/Organization: Huffington Post Media Group

Introduction

Alternately known as a “force of nature,” “the patron saint of new media,” and “the queen of aggregation,” Arianna Huffington helped to redefine news media on the Internet. She cofounded the Huffington Postin 2005 as an alternative to conservative news sites. Regularly offering both original and compiled news and entertainment stories, images, and videos, the Huffington Postcontinues to draw an increasing number of visitors to its site. Even though her detractors question her transformation from staunch conservative to active liberal, they have been forced to acknowledge Huffington's flair for providing a comfortable place for “Huffsters” to vent their opinions on everything from politics to celebrity antics. When AOL bought the Huffington Postfor $315 million in 2011, Huffington was placed at the head of the entire AOL media team. As the editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, she was initially in charge of TechCrunch, Engadget, Moviefone, Mapquest, Pop Eater, and AOL Music. Later, her editorial role was scaled back to just the Huffington Postbefore she stepped down from what had become a major media outlet.

Early Life

Ariadne Anna Stassinopoulos was born on July 15, 1950, to Constantine Stassinopoulos, a journalist and managerial consultant, and Elli Stassinopoulos, also a journalist, in Athens, Greece. Huffington would repeatedly say in interviews that her mother was the most significant influence on her life, because she taught her that there were no limits to what she could dream or accomplish. When young Arianna announced that she wished to be educated at the prestigious Cambridge University in England, her mother set out to help her realize her dream. The family moved to England in 1966, and within two years she was studying economics at Cambridge. Huffington's father also influenced her outlook: He had served time in a Nazi concentration camp after he was arrested for running an underground newspaper during World War II. Growing up in a family with that history imbued Huffington with a respect for the printed word that she would retain throughout her life. Her desire for financial success may also be attributed to those early years, when her family was constantly short of funds.

Joining the Cambridge Union debating society helped to prepare Huffington for her future as a political activist. In her final year, she was elected president of the club, becoming its first foreign-born leader and only the third female to head the club. In 1973, the year after she earned her master's degree in economics from Cambridge, Huffington published her first book, The Female Woman: An Argument against Women's Liberation for Female Emancipation, in which she argued that feminists were being unfair to women who opted for traditional roles. The book was an unexpected bestseller in England.

Over the next eight years, Huffington experimented with her spirituality. This included involvement with some socially edgy groups, such as Insight (which encouraged members to act out their fantasies) and a spiritual group headed by guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, which proved to be a cult and attempted to take over a town in Oregon. During this exploratory period, Huffington read the works of Carl Jung and wrote a second book, After Reason (1979), which questioned the social and political failures of the postwar era, criticizing both the Left and the Right. By 1981, Huffington was living in New York and publishing a biography of opera singer Maria Callas. Accused of plagiarizing part of the material, she settled out of court. A similar accusation followed the publication of the biography Picasso: Creator and Destroyer in 1988.

As a participant in the Los Angeles social scene of the early 1980s, she met oil tycoon Michael Huffington; they married in 1986. Following a lavish wedding, they moved to Washington, DC, where he served as assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. In 1992, Michael Huffington won a California seat in the House of Representatives as a Republican, and he later ran what was then the most expensive Senate race in American history, during which time Huffington campaigned vigorously for him. During this period, Huffington also wrote a syndicated column and appeared on television shows such as Politically Incorrect, Crossfire, and Face the Music. By 1997, however, the couple were divorced. Huffington returned to New York, where she continued to participate in political and social scenes and began to develop her public persona and her own professional life.

Life's Work

By 1996, Huffington had become disillusioned with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the entire Republican Party, whose conflict with President Bill Clinton over the federal budget led to the 1995–96 shutdown of the federal government. Huffington announced that she had become a “progressive populist.” Also in 1996, she began writing a syndicated column that appeared twice weekly in more than a hundred newspapers. In 2003, she entered the California gubernatorial race after Governor Gray Davis was recalled; she later withdrew amid claims that she had not paid her fair share in state taxes for the previous two years. In 2004, she endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president.

While attending a party in 2004, Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, a former AOL executive, decided to create the Huffington Post. They promised each other to raise $2 million apiece in start-up money. Huffington's years as a socialite, political activist, and hostess provided her with a stable of influential friends who served her well in this latest venture. She turned to them and raised her $2 million within a week. Huffington and Lerer subsequently turned to venture capitalists, particularly SoftBank Capital, for additional financial support. The Huffington Post, dubbed HuffPo by loyal followers, featured work by historian and social critic Arthur Schlesinger Jr., politician Gary Hart, actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and John Cusack, newsman Walter Cronkite, and comedian Larry David, among other celebrity bloggers.

The site was eventually divided into verticals on politics, business, entertainment, technology, media, life and style, culture, comedy, healthy living, women, and local news and has sections devoted to religion, Black voices, world news, and the environment. The Huffington Post uses videos and slide shows and contains numerous links to other internet sites. For many visitors, it is the ability to post comments on blogs that draws them to the site. Big news items or controversial story lines might generate five thousand or more comments. When HuffPo ran a story discussing the possibility of former Florida governor Jeb Bush running for president in 2012, there were more than eight thousand responses. Comments are moderated in order to ensure civility.

In 2009, the Huffington Post partnered with the social media site Facebook to create HuffPo Social News with Facebook Connect, resulting in 3.5 million visitors connecting to the Huffington Post from Facebook. The partnership allowed Facebook users to create a personal site that shared the HuffPo content they were reading, allowing for commentary with their Facebook friends.

Huffington is credited with most of the success of the Huffington Post. She was not afraid to try new technologies and methodologies, and HuffPo worked with technical experts in Ukraine, India, Chile, the Philippines, and Vietnam, as well as those in the United States. In large part because of the efforts of marketing expert Jonah Peretti, the Huffington Post uses search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that articles are worded in such a way that they show up near the top of a Google search.

The Huffington Post has been harshly criticized for taking material from other sites and using it to promote its own popularity. Huffington and her employees defended the practice by calling themselves “curators” of the news, insisting that such methods are integral to new media. Staff members also insist that including links to original content encourages visitors to visit those sites also, resulting in increased traffic to competitors' websites.

AOL (America Online) bought the Huffington Post in 2011 for $315 million. Huffington became the editor-in-chief of the newsroom for all AOL's media properties. Even though AOL dropped some 90 percent of its freelance journalists, Huffington began hiring journalists away from competitors. According to Huffington Post watchdog Jeff Bercovici of Forbes, with thirteen hundred full-time journalists, the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group soon had a staff larger than that of well-established newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

The Huffington Post acquired an archive of high-quality content largely based on the work of unpaid bloggers. In 2011, after AOL's acquisition of the site, a group of these bloggers filed a class-action suit against Huffington, the Huffington Post, and AOL, arguing that their work had helped increase the financial worth of the site and demanding a share of the profits. The case was dismissed in March 2012 on the grounds that the bloggers had entered into agreements to provide the paper with content with no expectation of monetary compensation, only the exposure that had been provided, and could not renegotiate those agreements ex post facto. In May, Huffington's responsibilities were scaled back to focus solely on the Huffington Post, which was continuing to grow. The site began developing local versions for different national markets, including Great Britain, Greece, and Mexico.

In August 2016 Huffington unexpectedly announced that she would be stepping down as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. (A year later, the website's official name was shortened to HuffPost.) She stated that the time had come for her to move on from what had now grown into a significant media empire. Huffington changed her focus to a new venture, Thrive Global, which aims to coordinate health and fitness within corporations through programs such as online courses and in-person seminars as well as with an online store. As the founder of the startup, she also serves as CEO and has been involved in the company at all levels as it has grown. By 2021, Thrive Global was worth more than $700 million. To support the company's mission to end stress and burnout in the workplace, Huffington published the books Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014) and The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time (2016), both of which were international bestsellers. Huffington has also served on the board of directors for the ride-hailing company Uber, where she reportedly urged better work-life balance.

For her work in disrupting media, Huffington has earned many accolades. She was named to the Time 100 list in 2006 and again in 2011, and was ranked among the Forbes Power Women numerous times. In 2021, she was named to Forbes magazine's inaugural 50 over 50 list.

Personal Life

In the mid-to-late 1970s, Huffington had a close relationship with London Times columnist Bernard Levin, whom she would later call the “love of her life” and who was her senior by more than two decades; they separated when it became clear that he did not wish to marry and have children. After her marriage to Michael Huffington in 1986, she gave birth to two daughters: Isabella in 1989 and Christina in 1991. She became a naturalized US citizen in 1990.

After the couple's 1997 divorce, Huffington continued her printed commentary on political life. In 1998, she published Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom, a satire on Bill Clinton's presidency. In the 2000s, her political works focused on the problems created by politicians interested in promoting their own interests over those of the American people: How to Overthrow the Government (2000), Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America (2004), Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (2008), and Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (2010).

After the 1990s, Huffington also maintained a public profile as a political and social commentator. She became a cohost of the political round table Left, Right, and Center for public radio; the show's format incorporated viewpoints from political commentators representing different political perspectives, and Huffington represented the “independent-progressive blogosphere.” With conservative political consultant and analyst Mary Matalin, Huffington hosted the syndicated radio program Both Sides Now. She also gives approximately one hundred speeches annually and is a frequent guest on nationally televised political and news programs.

On the lighter side, Huffington voiced Arianna the Bear for The Cleveland Show, an animated television show aired on the Fox network. She is the author of more than fifteen books and works with various charities. She has served on the advisory committee for A Place Called Home, a safe house for inner-city youths in Los Angeles, and as a trustee of the Archer School for Girls, which provides a nurturing environment for educating girls of middle school and high school age.

Bibliography

Bankoff, Jim. “Why the New York Times Should Stop Complaining about The Huffington Post.” Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism. Ed. David Folkenflik. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. Print.

Bercovici, Jeff. “The Honeymooners.” Forbes 187.11–12 (2011): 140–44. Print.

Brits, Adriaan. "Ariana Huffington's Wellness Startup Thrive Global Raises $80 Million at $700 Million Valuation." Truic Startup Savant, 8 July 2021, startupsavant.com/news/thrive-global-wellness. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.

Huffington, Arianna. "How Arianna Huffington Is Transforming America's Workplace to Benefit You." Interview by Bryan Robinson. Forbes, 15 Jan. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2020/01/15/how-arianna-huffington-the-meryl-streep-of-businesswomen-is-transforming-americas-workplace/. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.

Huffington, Arianna. Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America. New York: Three Rivers, 2009. Print.

Lyons, Daniel. “Arianna's Answer.” Newsweek 156.5 (2010): 44–47. Print.

Wemple, Erik. "Arianna Huffington Leaving the Huffington Post: It's Time." Washington Post. Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2016. Web. 7 Sept. 2016.