Adweek interviewed Arianna Huffington, whose site The Huffington Post draws 3.5 million unique readers a month.
Here are a few highlights:
Q: Do you consider yourself a brand, like Oprah or Martha Stewart?
A: I consider the Huffington Post a brand. A brand is something others may consider you, but I still consider myself a human being.
Q. When you launched your Web site, what surprised you most about the process?
A. One was how quickly we became a part of peoples’ daily news-gathering experience. In the past, it would have taken 20 years to build a brand and now it can take a year. The other is how many people who could be writing for a lot of other outlets have become addicted to blogging on the Huffington Post. And that is because of the immediacy you get from posting. … It enters the cultural blog stream in real time and it gets picked up.
Q. Clearly, you believe in citizen journalism. Do you see any downsides to this growing trend?
A. I don’t see a downside if the very important journalism tenets are adhered to: accuracy and fact checking. At the Huffington Post, we tell our bloggers if there is any mistake, they have 24 hours to correct it or their password will be removed. It is not correct to say you can’t be accurate if you are a blogger. And God knows there have been many major inaccuracies perpetrated by the mainstream media, especially in the lead-up to the war.
