Huffington, the Grand Captainess

In 2005, Arianna Huffington created The Huffington Post with Keneth Lerer, which was sold yesterday for a little more than 230 million euros ($315 million) to America On Line (AOL), the giant company of Internet-based services and content. The website knew to combine the best of traditional journalism — accuracy, desire for the truth and a dedication to checking every story — with the new opportunities that the Internet offers, such as forming a community of faithful users and connecting them with the best sites. The idea: to create a civilized atmosphere (personal attacks are not accepted) to promote in-depth discussions. Thanks to her long experience in fields as diverse as politics, culture and journalism, Arianna Huffington convinced respected representatives of all these worlds to publish blogs in their field (she started with 500 and now there are 6,000), with which they could offer the reflections of true experts on their respective subjects. Thus she formed a small team for producing their own news (where it was more important to tell stories than to give figures) and to select the other means that were consistent with their way of seeing things.

The result of the experiment: an average audience of 25 million users per month and third place among the most trusted sites in the world (the first is The New York Times). After the purchase by AOL, Arianna Huffington will become the head of a new company, The Huffington Post Media Group, which will provide the contents of her web page and those of the various AOL sites, all of which will reach some 117 million users in the U.S. and 270 million around the world.

These are the kind of numbers that AOL has always liked. It started as a videogame company, then it became an Internet access provider, and in 2000 it bought Time Warner. The merger didn’t work, and they split in 2009. Part of AOL’s strategy to recapture its former glory is what it is doing now by signing Arianna Huffington. She will be the grand captain of the new opportunity and has said that the destination they’re headed for is the same: that wise mixture of traditional rigor with new technologies. Let’s hope that the figures don’t inebriate her.