HuffPost | Description, History, Content, & Facts

HuffPost, formerly called The Huffington Post, also called HuffPo, American liberal Web site that offers news and commentary. It was founded in May 2005 by political activist Arianna Huffington, former America Online executive Kenneth Lerer, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab graduate Jonah Peretti. Headquarters are in New York City.

The site, originally known as The Huffington Post, was created to provide a liberal counterpart to the Drudge Report, a conservative Web site founded by Matt Drudge. It is free to users and generates revenue from advertising. The site originally featured blogs from unpaid bloggers drawn from the worlds of politics, entertainment, and academia; by 2018 it had some 100,000 such contributors. Celebrities and politicians who regularly contributed to The Huffington Post included John Cusack, Deepak Chopra, Nora Ephron, Bill Moyers, Bill Richardson, and John Kerry. Huffington served as the first editor in chief of The Huffington Post and was herself a frequent blogger on the site. In 2016 she left the site to start Thrive Global, a health-and-wellness venture. She was succeeded as editor in chief by Lydia Polgreen.

From the beginning, The Huffington Post also provided news updates, and in mid-2007 it expanded its coverage to include business and entertainment. In the ensuing years, the site’s focus on news increased—especially in regard to politics—and in 2018 it ended its unpaid blogger program. That year it also introduced two new sections, opinion and personal, both of which feature commissioned pieces; the latter section includes first-person essays. The site also has content-sharing partnerships with various other content providers.

In March 2011 AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million. As part of the deal, The Huffington Post Media Group was created, with Arianna Huffington as its president and editor in chief. The new venture included all of AOL’s media properties and The Huffington Post. That same year The Huffington Post expanded beyond the United States by launching editions in Canada and the United Kingdom. Editions were later launched in France, Spain, and Italy (all 2012) and in Japan and Germany (both 2013).

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In 2012 the U.S. version of The Huffington Post was awarded its first Pulitzer Prize (for national reporting by David Wood). That year the site also released Huffington, a weekly digital magazine that offered subscribers exclusive feature-length articles supplemented by video clips, infographics, and other multimedia. Shortly after, The Huffington Post launched HuffPost Live, an online network that rejected typical television programming formats and encouraged viewer participation.

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In 2015 The Huffington Post became part of Verizon after the communications company bought AOL. In 2017, a year after Huffington’s departure, the site’s name was changed to HuffPost.