Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post (HuffPost), spoke yesterday about the new digital age of journalism at the ninth annual Edward R. Murrow Forum on Issues in Journalism.
Huffington, who currently serves as the chair, president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, sat down for a discussion with Jonathan Tisch (A '76), the chairman of Loews Hotels who endowed the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts. University President Anthony Monaco and Communications and Media Studies Program Director Julie Dobrow introduced the two speakers.
"One of the things that characterized Murrow's approach as a journalist was that, as technology changed, he was there ready to try it, embrace it and see how it could be used to convey both news and opinion," Dobrow said. "In his day, Murrow never shied away from the difficult story nor did he veer away from telling stories in ways that were entertaining ... I also believe that Edward R. Murrow would have embraced our selection of Arianna Huffington as as this year's speaker because she, like he, is a true journalistic innovator."
Huffington discussed the founding of the HuffPost and said that she developed the website in response to the changing nature of journalism.
"I could see back in 2005 that a lot of conversation was moving online and that a lot of the people that I admired, that I read in print, were not going to be online," she said. "They weren't going to start their own blogs, and there wasn't a real platform for them."
Arthur Schlesinger was the first person Huffington invited to start a blog, but she explained that there was a major technical gap for older contributors like Schlesinger, who were not up to date on the new media forms. Huffington, however, felt that blogging was a way to provide a platform for a wide variety of voices.
"That was my first hope ... that we would elevate what blogging was by explaining that, at the same time as you have professional editors [and] professional journalists, it's great to have a platform that welcomes voices," she said. " What is great about what we wanted to create from the beginning is that there is no hierarchy. You can have you or the president of France or the president of Tufts [University] next to a homeless teenager who has something interesting to say."
While the HuffPost has garnered criticism about its aggregation methods, Huffington explained that this is one of its four primary purposes.
"The goal was always to be four things: blogging which was basically commentary news that we produce, investigative journalism which we added two years after we launched ... and news aggregation," she said. "I believe that even if I had an unlimited budget, I would still aggregate news because our promise to readers is that they can come to The Huffington Post and find the most interesting things on the Internet, whether we produce them or [bring] them together."
Huffington said that websites like HuffPost have the ability to bring information together and disseminate it to the global population, which has had a tremendous impact on world events.
"It has already spawned revolutions," she said. "It has upended governments, it has given a form of expression to more people than it has before, it has democratized information and communication. Interestingly enough, self expression has become the new entertainment, and it's fascinating how people want to express themselves. They want to be part of the story of their times, and that's incredibly healthy."
Despite the growing popularity of online media, Huffington nevertheless feels that print media will survive as she believes having a hard copy of a newspaper or magazine is essentially a part of the human DNA. Huffington also stressed that the advance of online media allows journalists to be more persistent in finding and publishing information. Whereas most print journalists with the exception of Murrow would abandon a story after several days, she said online media has reversed this phenomenon.
"You would see big stories break on the front pages of newspaper and always die there," she said. "The great thing about online journalism is that it's easier to stay on a story and keep developing it. You may not have the big breaking news every day on the story, but you can develop it with the latest that has happened ... and therefore stories can stay alive longer than before."
Huffington also spoke about her new book, "Thrive," which details her idea for a new metric to define success. She explained that she collapsed several years ago from her stress and workload, and has since discovered that wisdom is the third pillar to achieving success.
"We allow the world to define success as just these two legs: money and power," she said. "As I came to ... I looked around, and I saw a lot of people who were unbelievably burned out, who would have been successful by conventional definitions, but their health has been impaired, their capacity to make wise decisions has been impaired."
Huffington concluded that there is an important role for citizen journalists, and that anyone can benefit society through writing.12
