Arianna Huffington

I thought I would re-visit an old subject this week for “The Sunday Morning Post:” Arianna Huffington. When I first started Bloggers Market, I thought I would take a shot at “Arianna Huffington” as a keyword and suggested in my post that “Arianna Huffingtosn should visit my Blog”. Man, ……. in a word ZOOM! Really one of the few times I owned Google!

I don’t really know Arianna Huffington personally of course, so I can’t bring anything else to bear on this post that hasn’t already been written, and I doubt that I will be receiving any kind of granted interview, so ……… I fall back on my Blog building skills and present “Pillar Content” on Arianna Huffington. I am always challenged on the Blogs that I sell, with the potential buyer of my Blogs wanting to know if the content is unique. My response is usually the same, I’m a geek, not a wizard. The new owner who buys the Blog has to provide the new content, not me! I digress ……….

Let me present to you Arianna Huffington as seen through open source Wikipedia. Go ahead and read, you will certainly learn something. Enjoy.

Huffington was born Arianna Stassinopoulos in Athens. Greece. the daughter of Konstantinos (a journalist and management consultant) and Elli (née Georgiadi) Stassinopoulos, and is the sister of Agapi (an author, speaker and performer). To this day, she speaks with a marked Greek accent. She moved to England at the age of 16 and attended Girton College at Cambridge University where in 1971 she was President of the Cambridge Union Society. the third woman to hold the position, and graduated with a BA (later to become an MA in accordance with Cambridge’s practice) in economics in 1972.

After graduation, she moved to London and lived with the journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin. whom she had met while the two were panelists on the TV show Face the Music . In 1980 she left Levin and moved to the United States. after he refused to marry her. Both were, at around this time, disciples of the meditation teacher Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). After Levin’s death in 2004, she called him “the big love of my life, a mentor as a writer, and a role model as a thinker”. During these years and around the time of her involvement with John-Roger ‘s religious group, she was involved with Democratic politician and then-governor (currently Attorney General) of California, Jerry Brown. It was during this time that Huffington was first known as a liberal Democrat.

She met oil millionaire Michael Huffington. a family friend of the Bushes, at a 1985 party hosted by Ann Getty in San Francisco. The couple was married in 1986 at a wedding paid for by Getty, who had declared that she needed to find Arianna a husband. They moved to Washington, D.C.. when he was appointed to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy. They later established residency in Santa Barbara, California. in order for him to run in 1992 as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. which he won by a significant margin. He was a political conservative on most issues. Arianna campaigned for her husband, courting religious conservatives, arguing for smaller government and a reduction in welfare. In 1994 he narrowly lost the race for the U.S. Senate seat from California to incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

The couple divorced in 1997. The financial terms of their divorce agreement remain undisclosed. Arianna Huffington chose to retain her former husband’s surname, although she had been known as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington during the period of her marriage.

The Huffington Post (often referred to as HuffPo ) is an American news website and aggregated blog founded by Arianna Huffington. Kenneth Lerer. and Jonah Peretti. featuring various news sources and columnists. The site offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement, world news, and comedy, and is a top destination for news, blogs, and original content. The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a commentary outlet and liberal and progressive alternative to conservative news aggregators like the Drudge Report .

In 2008, the site launched its first local version, HuffPost Chicago; HuffPost New York launched in June, 2009, HuffPo Denver launched on September 15, 2009 . and HuffPo Los Angeles launched on December 2, 2009. The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month.

The Huffington Post publishes scoops of current news stories, links to selected prominent news stories, and provides a liberal counterpoint to sites such as the Drudge Report . Compared to other left-wing blogs such as Znet or Daily Kos . The Huffington Post offers both news commentary and coverage. The comment section is home to discussions on politics, religion, and world affairs.

The Huffington Post’s OffTheBus is a citizen-powered online news organization that is a collaboration between The Huffington Post. New York University (NYU), and Jay Rosen ‘s NewAssignment.Net. The Huffington Post’sFundRace is a website that tracks contributions to the presidential campaigns and includes a mapping feature that shows contributions broken down by city, neighborhood, and block.

A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its alphabetical Bloggers Index

According to Nielsen NetRatings. Huffington Post had 8.9 million unique visitors in February, 2009 (by way of comparison, the right-leaning Drudge Report had 3.4 million unique visitors).

The Huffington Post has 22 million unique users each month and is the most linked-to blog on the Internet.

I’m going to jump in here real quick and update this post with the current news that Arianna Hugffington has sold the Huffington Post to AOL on Friday, February 4, 2011 for $315 million with about $300 million of that being provided as cash.