Arianna Online: AOL bets on Huffington's cachet.(Business)

Byline: Robin Abcarian; Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK -- Elegantly clad in black lace, her famously copper hair now blond, Arianna Huffington was surrounded by friends and well-wishers as she arrived Saturday at a fundraising dinner for Columbia University's student newspaper. Everyone wanted to congratulate her on AOL's $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.

"You're in the big show now," said David Stone, Columbia's executive vice president for communications.

Huffington gently shook her head, widened her eyes and replied, "It's all a little too much, isn't it?"

With Huffington, you could say, it's always been a little too much. The native of Greece has never taken a minimalist approach in her many New Worlds -- Cambridge, Mass.; New York; Washington, D.C.; Montecito, Calif.; Los Angeles. She came with ambition, smarts, charm, letters of introduction and an unfailing sense of whom to cultivate for maximum success.

The 60-year-old best-selling polemicist, biographer and pundit, whose friends told her she was too old to start an Internet venture when she launched the Huffington Post six years ago, has now conquered a corner of cyberspace.

After several unprofitable years, Huffington's website -- combining news from traditional journalism sources, unpaid blog posts, fluffy photo galleries and a smattering of original stories -- says it turned a profit last year and expects revenue to double to $60 million in 2011.

With about 25 million monthly visitors, the Huffington Post is one of the Web's most popular news sites. But how much that will help AOL transcend its dial-up roots, its ill-fated acquisition of Time Warner and its hemorrhaging bottom line is the subject of debate in the blogosphere and beyond. (Last year, AOL's ad revenue dropped 29 percent, said Chief Executive Tim Armstrong, and the company laid off a third of its work force, which is now about 5,000. HuffPo employs 210.)

Huffington said she persuaded co-founder Kenneth Lerer, a former AOL Time Warner executive, and their board to sell to AOL even though it probably wasn't the most lucrative deal possible.

"I really convinced them that this was not the best price -- because we could have gotten more -- but the best home," she said.

The mostly cash deal, finalized on Super Bowl Sunday, puts Huffington in charge of all editorial content for AOL, which includes Politics Daily, TechCrunch, FanHouse, PopEater and Patch -- a network of about 800 hyperlocal news sites -- as well as MapQuest and Moviefone. Her challenge will be to inject some cachet into a faded Internet brand.

More "magic" ahead?

Huffington will be judged on her ability to make AOL's content "magical," which will then make its advertising "magical," Armstrong said, adding that, "Consumers are smart and know when they see magical experiences."

A ubiquitous media presence, she is an author whose work spans biographies (Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso), memoir ("On Becoming Fearless") and politics ("Right is Wrong," "Third World America"). She left the Columbia dinner early to fly to Washington, D.C., where she appeared the next morning on ABC's "This Week." Total airtime: about two minutes.

Huffington and Armstrong bristle at the suggestion users and advertisers might be turned off by her site's liberal roots. They call it a "red herring."

"We welcome voices from across the spectrum," Huffington said. "When Newt Gingrich or Joe Scarborough or David Frum or Tony Blankley write for us, they are always treated respectfully, and they get good play."

From advocacy to business

But the site was conceived as a liberal response to the conservative Drudge Report. Huffington and Lerer founded it in May 2005 after John Kerry's loss to George W. Bush. Lerer has contributed nearly $200,000 to Democrats since 1994, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In 2008, Portfolio media reporter Jeff Bercovici noted the Huffington Post was moving into nonpolitical areas to appeal to advertisers. If that continued, he wrote, "Maybe, someday, HuffPo will be a $200 million business."

Huffington's old friend Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Internet entrepreneur who worked for her as she developed the site, said he left because he was turned off by its liberal orientation. But for two mostly glorious years, he said, he worked in her Los Angeles home, in her "Anne Frank makeshift hideaway office" -- accessed by swinging open a large painting of two clergymen, one of whom has caught the other cheating at cards.

Huffington friend and DailyCaller.com blogger Mickey Kaus said he thought Huffington, a onetime Republican and now a registered Democrat, was never as left-wing as many believed her to be.

"If you listen to her closely over the years, I think it's been clear she's not any kind of socialist," Kaus said. "She wants a market economy but just wants to punish the bad actors and scammers and polluters."

As a boss, Huffington has inspired and tormented her employees. Watching her in action, Breitbart said, was a lesson in developing a thick skin.

"I don't really see it as thick skin," Huffington said. "I see it as being permeable. I mean, if you look at children, the way they deal with things they don't like, they might cry and be really upset, but five minutes later, it's like it never happened. That's what I aspire to."

Even employees who felt overworked came away with something positive. "For all the heartache ... it was a completely invaluable experience. I would do it again," said a former employee who nonetheless spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Huffington.

And of course, there were the sweaters. Her employees get an expensive one each Christmas, hand-picked by Huffington.

Armstrong recalled that when AOL did its due diligence, "Someone said, 'There is a giant budget in here for "miscellaneous"; what is that?' I said, 'It's the sweaters.' "

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Arianna Huffington: Deal offered ''the best home.'' (0415838655)

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