The Huffington Post, also called HuffPo or HuffPost, American news-and-commentary Web site, with offices in Los Angeles and New York City. The Huffington Post 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.
The Huffington Post was created to provide a liberal counterpart to the Drudge Report, a conservative news-and-commentary Web site founded by Matt Drudge. The Huffington Post is free to users and generates revenue from advertising. It features blogs from more than 1,600 unpaid bloggers drawn from the worlds of politics, entertainment, and academia. Celebrities and politicians who regularly contributed to The Huffington Post include John Cusack, Deepak Chopra, Nora Ephron, Bill Moyers, Bill Richardson, and John Kerry. Huffington serves as editor in chief of The Huffington Post and is herself a frequent blogger on the site.
Besides featuring celebrity blog posts, The Huffington Post provides news updates and hyperlinks to news sources and columnists. The site has content-sharing partnerships with TMZ.com, People, Rolling Stone, Variety, and Yahoo!, among other content providers. In mid-2007 The Huffington Post expanded its coverage to include business and entertainment news. In 2008 special news sections were added to The Huffington Post for the U.S. presidential election: Off The Bus offered news from the campaign trail, and Fundrace allowed users to track celebrity donations to political candidates.
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). 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.