Attention political junkies: The Huffington Post is becoming a news site.
HuffingtonPost.com founder Arianna Huffington told The New York Times yesterday that she intends to add original reporting to her opinion-based political Web site.
Leading the initiative as the site’s new political editor will be Melinda Henneberger, a Newsweek contributing editor and former reporter for the Times and Newsday.
She’s just finished a book about women voters who left the Democratic Party after the 2004 elections. Now she wants to create an online home for 2008 voters who haven’t yet found a comfortable political habitat. The plan is to build a team of journalists — she’s not sure yet how many — to cover politics in a way that is “different from anything else out there.”
It was largely the prospect of working in a Web-only forum — “that’s certainly where the growth is in our industry” — and hand-picking her own team that drew Henneberger to the project. “And I love what Arianna has in mind,” she said.
Right now, HuffingtonPost.com is home base for hundreds of blogs and aggregated media, political and lifestyle news — with a reputation for left-leaning politics. (Recent posts carried the headlines: “Bush Appoints new (Terrifying) Director of the Office of Violence Against Women,” “What If, Just What If, Bush Isn’t a Complete Idiot?” and “Are You Psychotic? Because Empirically That Makes You Susceptible to Being a Republican.”)
This newest venture will add reported pieces — features, profiles, news briefs, all with a dose of opinion and, as Huffington put it, “attitude” — to the mix.
But Henneberger doesn’t consider her new role an online form of liberal evangelism. She’s looking to capture a broader audience.
“I hope to bring in what I call ‘the politically homeless,’ ” she told Poynter Online in a telephone interview Thursday. “I’d like to expand the readership by bringing in people across the political spectrum. We are a left-leaning operation, there’s no two ways about that. But in tone and in substance, I’d like to make more people feel like taking a look.”
What they’ll see when they get there is still undetermined. The goal, Henneberger said, is to marry the reported news with the site’s growing blog community. The articles from news organizations such as The Associated Press, CNN and The Washington Post already in the site’s “The News” section will most likely remain — at least in part. Ideally, there will be a significant level of interactivity between HuffPost bloggers and the reported pieces she and a team of HuffPost journalists will produce.
How will that work? “Remains to be seen,” Henneberger said. But it might look something like an online magazine with an engaged community behind it.
Henneberger’s work officially starts in January, and soon after, she’ll assemble a team of reporters to work for the site. One of their goals: to create an online presidential debate. The election is two years away, but the contest has already begun, she said.
Digging into Washington politics won’t be a new task for Henneberger. She’s been writing political profiles and columns for Newsweek since 2003 and has spent the past two years writing her first book, “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear,” due in bookstores this May.
Her work at Newsweek allowed Henneberger to incorporate her voice into her work. (See her “Who are the ‘Real’ Catholics?” column from April 2004.) She’s not concerned about the transition from “traditional” media to an online news site — or the injection of opinion that will accompany it.
“A few of the bloggers I’ve talked to have said that it is a huge challenge, because not a lot of people from the traditional, mainstream press would feel comfortable in the blogosphere,” she said, “but I think I might have been one of those who always had too many opinions for straight news anyway.”
The announcement of Henneberger’s move comes just 10 days after The Washington Post announced that national politics editor John Harris and political reporter Jim VandeHei would be leaving the paper to start a new Web site.
Is this a trend in political reporting? Not necessarily, Henneberger says, “but that’s certainly where the growth is in our industry.”
It’s a way to reach a broad audience, she said. And ultimately, it’s not about where stories are published — it’s about how they’re envisioned and executed.
“I saw an interview with Ben Bradlee recently where he said, ‘You know, what newspapers need to do is just run good stories.’ And he’s absolutely right,” she said. “As simple as that sounds … no matter where you are, if you run interesting stories, everyone will find you out.”