Huffington, Lerer and their original investors, who kicked in a reported $2.5 million in seed money, have reaped handsome returns. Furthermore, the Huffington Post, with its celebrity contributors and golden visitor demographic—postgraduate, upper-income—is quickly becoming the blueprint for blog success. Huffington won’t disclose exactly how much advertiser revenue the blog generates, but it is sufficient to support a growing staff of 45 on both coasts. (Lerer has said publicly that he expects the Huffington Post to be profitable by some time next year.)

(Photograph by Kevin Lynch.)

This success was not a given, as Huffington herself concedes. She is a politically polarizing figure who very publicly went from being the wife of an affluent Republican politician to running as a populist candidate for the California governorship to becoming a contrarian, left-leaning media gadfly. Her launch of the blog was greeted with derision by many in the media. Yet she prevailed. From her Brentwood home in Los Angeles, she recently discussed the Huffington Post, its winning business model, and how she found the courage to stare down her critics and rewrite the rules of new-media success.

In the Huffington Post [HP] you’ve created a very successful new-media venture. How have you succeeded in an arena where so many others have failed?

The key to our success was our timing. We were the first to do a collective blog with multiple voices. At the same time, we have breaking news constantly refreshed, together with opinion on that breaking news, as well as on topics that are more perennial. The combination of those factors coming together for the first time online, with a certain attitude and with a really good, clean design, is the winning formula.

After being live for a relatively short time, you were able to line up venture capital investors to invest several million dollars, which is highly unusual in the business of blogs.

SoftBank has done two rounds of financing for us. Originally, the Huffington Post was financed primarily by our family and friends. People who really believed in what we were doing put in $100,000 each and probably thought they would never see it again. Shortly thereafter, they were able to cash out and take back three times their investment. That’s when SoftBank came in with its first $5 million.

How active are your venture capital investors in HP’s strategic planning and growth?

What has been great for me is that I love who I’m working with. Eric Hippeau [SoftBank’s managing partner] has been not just an investor, but an incredible strategist. He and his colleagues really understand new media. They never interfere with content, but in terms of helping us see the direction we are taking and our expansion, they do play an active role. It is like a dream to have a great partner who is strong where I am weak. You know, I studied economics at Cambridge, but it has never been something that interested me. My eyes glaze over when I am given too many profit and loss statements to look at.

When you founded HP, did you see it more as a business venture or as an expression of your passion for politics?

The Huffington Post certainly was an expression of my passion and the passion of my business partner [Ken Lerer]. We were introduced at a dinner in New York by some mutual friends, Tom Freston [the former president of Viacom] and his wife, Kathy, and we hit it off right away.

During the 2004 presidential election, we watched the way the media were covering the campaign, and we saw a clear need for a different approach to covering news and opinion. That was really the impetus behind creating the Huffington Post. We always knew we wanted to be advertising-sustained, but we didn’t know if it would be advertising-sustained at the level of six employees [the number it started with] or 45 employees [the current level], or how large the venture would grow.

Will blogs, as a media sector, eventually become attractive investments, or is the Huffington Post just a lucrative fluke?

As in everything, there are blogs that are incredibly good investments and blogs that are not. It’s not the blog itself, but how you do it. The idea of blogging—it’s in real time, it’s a personal view on what’s happening, it has more intimacy and more directness—really resonates. You have corporations using it, as well as CEOs. People know it is for real. It’s hard to fake a blog because you can see a blogger’s fingerprints. This type of communication is much more effective than a press release because it is personal. And that’s where the value lies.

How integral is your public persona to your blog’s success?

It’s hard for me to answer that, but I think that in general, the Internet is very personal, very intimate, so it requires voices behind opinions. At HP there is always a human being behind the expression of an opinion and—not just in my case, but in all the successful Internet ventures—you can identify a person behind the venture or the opinion expressed.

That’s true. I visit many different opinion blogs, and the anonymous ones don’t seem particularly legitimate. Their bloggers are just railing.

Even with comments, which are traditionally anonymous, our policy has been that you have to register to comment on the Huffington Post. Even from the early days when we could scarcely afford it, we invested in 24/7 comment moderation. We are the host, and we vouch for the nature of the discourse. So if people comment on your blog, they may be critical, but they are not going to be allowed to use ad hominem attacks. That is our policy on commenters: We do not want people hiding behind anonymity to act like trolls and take unfounded shots at someone.

There are those who dismiss political blogs as being too partisan, even intentionally unfair.

You know, fairness doesn’t mean you don’t have a position. It means that you are being fair to both sides. When you have a position on the war in Iraq—which we did, which was that we should not have gone in—everything we wrote, on both sides of the issue, had to be fact-checked, accurate and fair.

When you launched your blog, some in the press dismissed it as a vanity project and a superficial online soapbox for Hollywood liberals. Did that chilly reception ever make you question what you were doing?

There were a lot of people who did not expect us to succeed, and in fact, we did not know if it would succeed or not. I say in my book On Becoming Fearless, often the things you most want to do are the riskiest, and you don’t know if they are going to work or not. The lesson is, don’t be afraid of failing. If you are, you will shy away from anything with a component of risk, and the best things do have a component of risk. A lot of my friends said, "Why do you need that? You have your books, your column, your speaking. Why do you need to venture into the Internet? This is a young person’s business—twentysomethings do this." For me, this is a question of our lives. If we can follow our passion, sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. I know I’ve failed plenty of times.

Who was your first contributor?

The first person I invited to blog was Arthur Schlesinger. When I called and asked him to blog, he said to me, "What’s a blog? Why don’t I take you to lunch so you can tell me." So we went to the Century Club in New York, and he and I were the youngest people there. I talked to him about blogging, and he said to me, "I really don’t use email." I said, you can fax it to me, so he faxed me his blog. One day, soon after we met, the president gave a speech on the Yalta Accords, and Schlesinger had been a part of all that, and he blogged immediately about its meaning. This was exactly what we wanted to achieve.

The Huffington Post quickly went from being a blog offering opinions to a player in national events. I’m thinking specifically of your contrarian coverage of the Judith Miller episode [involving information on CIA employee Valerie Plame leaked by White House staff members, and the subsequent investigation led by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald]. You asked a lot of very pointed questions that mainstream media sources overlooked.

That was exactly what we want to do. When the conventional wisdom was that Judy Miller was the Joan of Arc of journalists, we looked at that and said, "Was she really?" We wanted to expose her role in selling the president’s lies. The conventional wisdom is often wrong, and yet it congeals very quickly.

Joan Didion observed that in national events, once the media chooses a preferred narrative, that’s it—they ask no more questions and tell no other story.

Joan Didion actually wrote the best piece about Bob Woodward, long before anyone else began to question his work. She called his writing "political pornography." Great! I love that. That was an amazingly prescient piece given Woodward’s later work—actually being in the White House and missing the story on Iraq in two books.

You have created a business model that meets the needs of four constituencies: your contributors, your visitors, your advertisers and your investors. People have been trying for a decade now to do that with online ventures, and so many have failed.

People have said, "You have an interesting business model—you don’t pay your writers." [Laughs]

I know several publishers who would like to know how you get away with that.

What we found is that we provide our writers with a platform that gets their views out there in real time. We maintain that platform, we keep growing the number of people who come to the platform, and we get the content out. A lot of people link to us. People come to the site for many different reasons and in many different ways.

So the idea is: A) We want the regulars to be able to write about their interests. B) We want people who may not know about the Huffington Post to discover it because, for instance, a young actor like Ryan Reynolds has blogged, or Jamie Lee Curtis has blogged or Perez Hilton links to us. Suddenly we notice we get clicks from people who probably have never heard of us before, and they come to us because of someone or something that interests them on another site. They will come and discover the politics on HP, and we will have expanded to a new audience.

HP offered a forum and a home for a lot of left-leaning political types during what some of them call the "wilderness years" before the Democrats retook Congress in 2006. Will George W. Bush’s departure from office dampen the passions of the bloggers who have made your site successful?

I don’t think so. First of all, I think that one of the goals of HP is to help us move away from the right-left framing. I think it is obsolete, and it makes it harder for us to see what is really happening. If you take some of the biggest issues of our time, such as 70 percent of the people, Democrats and Republicans alike, want to bring the troops home from Iraq, that is not a left-wing position. Universal healthcare is also not a left-wing position. Mitt Romney, a Republican, brought it about in Massachusetts. Healthcare has become an issue with many corporations. That is why the framing of this is so important. That’s another kind of passion of mine: to look at issues with a fresh perspective instead of with these labels.

In the broader media landscape, what role will blogs play in 10 years?

There is a convergence taking place. Mainstream media are moving into blogs, some of them with a lot of success. The Washington Post has some great bloggers, as do the National Journal and the Atlantic Monthly. At the same time, blogs such as the Huffington Post are moving into original reporting. Josh Marshall’s blog, Talking Points Memo, broke the story on the U.S. attorney scandal. They used the "wisdom of the crowd" method: Somebody in Arizona noticed that a U.S. attorney was fired in Arizona, somebody else noticed in San Diego, and they connected the dots.

Some say that with HP you are laying the groundwork for a media empire. Will you eventually bring your two daughters into the family business?

I don’t think of it that way. My daughters are very interested in the Huffington Post. One of them worked as a comment moderator. They love to go to our offices in New York, because, first of all, everyone there is closer to their age than to mine. That is such a great place for teenagers interested in politics. While my daughters do love it, ultimately what they want to do with their lives is much their own decision. They have to finish high school and college first. The thing that I want for my children is for them to find their passion, whatever that is.

In 100 years, will Rupert Mur doch’s heirs be offering top dollar to your heirs to buy controlling interest in a Huffington media conglomerate?

[Laughs] I don’t have five-year plans, much less life plans. The great thing about life is that the best things that happen are not planned at all.Right now, I love what I’m doing, and I’m putting all my energy into it. I could spend 12 hours a day just working on the site, editing new content, bringing in new contributors. I feel that anywhere we want to go, we can do it there.