Arianna Huffington: 'I'm optimistic about the media - even newspapers'

The Huffington Post's founder on its new emphasis on lifestyle and wellbeing, life at AOL and leaning back like a cat

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Jane Martinson and Mark Sweney

The Guardian, Sunday 1 June 2014 18.02 BST

Leaning back Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

As the finale to her week-long stay in London, Arianna Huffington will

today chair an annual meeting of the Huffington Post's 11 international
editors. As well as setting "the editorial priorities for the next year", the
site's founder says she will reaffirm a strategy whereby "in the last year
we went from being primarily a politics and news site to being a thought
leader in how we live our lives".
While news and politics remains HuffPo's No 1 content category, with
40m monthly uniques in the US, lifestyle and wellbeing has grown from
being insignificant to overtaking entertainment and technology to become
the second biggest category, with 26m monthly uniques.
"We will continue to be a politics and news site that is No 1 in the States
and continues to grow everywhere," says Huffington. "We are not in
anyway detracting from that, but we are also going to continue to invest a
lot of resources and time in Third Metric messages." The Third Metric a
third way of defining success, beyond the old metrics of money and
power is an idea set out in her new book Thrive, which she launched in
the UK (at No 11 Downing Street, naturally, with George Osborne as
host) during her London trip.
HuffPo's UK editor-in-chief, Carla Buzasi, was given the additional role of
global director of lifestyle in January, and it was announced last week

that the site will work with four top London media agencies to "introduce
the Third Metric concept to their employees". Not a few eyebrows have
been raised at the prospect of cynical, hardboiled media buyers being
taught how to "make room in [their] lives for wellbeing, wisdom, wonder
and giving" at workshops including yoga, massages, mindfulness
sessions, "and even happiness coaching from happiness and wellbeing
activist Susie Pearl".
Huffington has been an evangelist for getting enough sleep, turning off
digital devices and reconnecting with family and friends ever since a
"wake-up call" in 2007 when she collapsed from exhaustion at her desk
and fractured a cheekbone. Yet anyone who thinks that her 14th book is
about kicking back and taking more time off fundamentally
misunderstands Thrive, and indeed Huffington herself.
Thrive is often described as the antithesis to another book calling for
women to make changes in their lives, Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. Yet
Huffington frequently appears on platforms with the Facebook chief
operating officer, and Thrive's first endorsement is from Sandberg.
Huffington, so fond of pets that she devotes a chapter to "furry friends
with different benefits", uses an animal analogy to explain why the books
are similar. "It is so easy to misunderstand," she sighs. "You also need to
learn to lean back, as like a cat you need to lean back in order to jump
higher." So sleep and rest are "performance enhancement tools", not an
alternative to success but a way of achieving it.
Asked if she's a feminist, Huffington who published The Female
Woman in the 70s, slating the "brainwashing" women's liberation
movement replies "absolutely". Thrive calls for a "third women's
revolution" to end male-dominated workplaces which consider burnout "a
badge of honour". Her own life, writing from home when her daughters
(now grown-up) were small but remaining ambitious enough to set up her
company, embodies the idea that women should be able to succeed
financially and work at home for a period while caring for children. Her
model of self-fulfilment still offers a marked contrast to the sisterly
solidarity of early feminists, of course.
One of the obvious objections to the book is that it's all very well for a
multimillionaire to write about needing to sleep more when many women
on low incomes struggle to put food on the table. "The more you can take
care of your own human capital, tap into your inner strength and
resources, the more resilient you will be," is all she will say.
Perhaps the biggest criticism of Huffington is that she made her millions
off the back of unpaid volunteers. Indeed Google her name and "unpaid
bloggers" still comes up as the most common search term. She is
adamant that she has done nothing wrong: "This fails to understand the

nature of the internet and platforms," she says. No one asks why
Facebook won't share some of its IPO proceeds, she says, or why
contributors to Tumblr (sold to Yahoo for $1bn) received nothing. Asked
why the Post continues to use unpaid volunteers, she says: "I think it's
because we're the first media company to really elevate blogging. In
2005 people were making fun of bloggers, saying they were people who
couldn't get a job, sitting in their parents' basements, but we brought in
politicians and celebrities." Besides, she says, look at the homeless
teenage blogger offered a place at Harvard and all those given TV shows
or book deals. These few examples will not be enough to satisfy the
9,000 who lodged a legal appeal against the AOL deal. Their complaint
was dismissed after the judge said the bloggers had gone into the
arrangement "with eyes wide open".
She ducks a question about whether she faces more criticism as a
woman but says of Jill Abramson's departure as editor of the New York
Times, "there's no question that the language being used that she was
'brash', 'abrasive' these are words almost exclusively used about
women. Men tend to be 'driven' and 'authoritative'. There's no question
that there is a double standard for women at the top. That language has
definitely been used about me over the years that I am difficult or
demanding absolutely."
There have been rumours about her departure from AOL she signed a
four-year contract which ends next year but she says she intends to
continue working with chief executive Tim Armstrong. "HuffPo is a
standalone with AOL as the parent company while we totally determine
our editorial policies. There's one year left, but Tim and I want to renew it.
So there's no change."
An Indian edition is due this year, and Huffington is keen on
"groundbreaking" journalism exploring "solutions". "We've [so far] done
three big projects, around creating jobs, women's non-profits and social
entrepreneurship. We are prioritising [solutions] as seriously as covering
corruption and speaking to power, which is a very big departure for
journalists, because [stories like these were] traditionally seen as fluffy."
Her eldest daughter, who previously worked for the family firm, now has
a job at Participant Media, the production company behind films such as
An Inconvenient Truth, and Huffington is thrilled. "I am very optimistic
about the future media industry. I am even optimistic about the future of
newspapers."
Would she launch a business using her first name? After all, she's
becoming a bit like Oprah or Beyonc with no need for the surname. "I've
learned never to rule out anything. Remember I ruled out doing another
book and here we are discussing Thrive. But having said that, I love the

combination of what I'm doing: HuffPost and taking the message of

Thrive around the world and across all our international editions." And
we're left with that image of a cat leaning back in order to jump even
higher.
This article was amended on 2 June 2014 to clarify that bloggers' case
against AOL was dismissed