In just a little more than two years, the Huffington Post has gone from being a side project for socialite Arianna Huffington to a new-media powerhouse whose Web traffic dwarfs that of many traditional media competitors and even threatens to topple the legendary Drudge Report for largest media destination site, with close to four million unique visitors a month.
So what's next up the HuffPo's sleeve? Local journalism, apparently. The site announced last week that it plans to hire editors in major centres, beginning with Chicago, who will pull together coverage from various news sources, including wire services and local bloggers and websites. Huffington says she hopes to expand the project to dozens of other cities, and she sees the local sites becoming the equivalent of a newspaper.
Huffington has also made it clear, however, that just reporting the facts isn't enough for her site, which has made its name based in large part on the opinionated commentary of its bloggers - including some well-known names, such as actor/comedian Harry Shearer - as well as on the "citizen journalism" it has engaged in, including some controversial reporting on the U.S. election campaign by blogger/journalist Mayhill Fowler.
At a recent conference in New York, Huffington said one of the reasons why new media have become popular is that old media have failed readers, part because of their commitment to a false kind of objectivity. "This is one the major problems of old media," she said. "The illusion of presenting two sides of a story instead of just ferreting out the truth."
