Wired’s Interview With Arianna Huffington

In an audio interview on the Epicenter blog, Wired’s front man, David Weinberger, interviews Huffington Post’s founder to try to understand the reasons for why her political media site has become so successful. Here’s an interesting extract?

David: [Are you] “sticking it to the man”[?]

Arianna: …I prefer to see what we’re doing as part of a new future, which incorporates the best of traditional journalists and the best of traditional journalists and other writers.

It’s not by accident that when we first dreamt up the Huffington Post, the first person I invited to blog was Arthur Schlesinger, because I believed he was one of the major voices of our times. He barely had a computer, and because I believe that the online conversation is the most important conversation going right now with so many multiple voices, I wanted him and Norman Mailer and Walter Cronkite and great voices of our culture to be part of it.

So that’s why I’m seeing it more as how to integrate the best of the old with the best of the new– certainly what we see in the Huffington Post as being the first Internet newspaper (and we’re not there yet by any means), but as we are writing original reporting, and as we are writing functions like “Huff It” (which is our way of doing “Digg It” and involving our readers in the choice of what goes on the front page).

And as we’re involving our community in the discussion of the news of the day, then we’re also bringing together all the different elements of an internet newspaper, which includes social engagement and user participation and user generated content and all those things that did not exist before the internet or at least not to the same extent.

Epicenter