When celebrities blog!
Arianna Huffington's new project combines new-media buzz with Hollywood liberal glitz. But will it be "Star Wars" -- or "Ishtar"?
By Farhad Manjoo
Read more: Technology & Business, Arianna Huffington, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features, Farhad Manjoo
May 10, 2005 | Very few new Web sites are heralded in the New York Times and the Washington Post before they launch. Credit Arianna Huffington's singular marketing savvy for managing this feat. For months, the syndicated columnist, one-time political candidate, one-time Senate candidate's wife and longtime Hollywood political maven has been regaling reporters with news of her upcoming project, the Huffington Post, which went live shortly after midnight Monday.
By inviting hundreds from Hollywood to participate, and by hiring Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge's right-hand man, to work on the site, Huffington (whose column, now on hiatus, appears in Salon) set the bar high. "As the day follows the night, Drudge will inspire its opposite" was how Warren Beatty, one of Huffington's celeb bloggers, described the project to the New York Observer. Though Huffington insists that she has never claimed to be a Drudge killer, the impression left by her advance press suggested a looming, epic Web grudge match: Arianna vs. Drudge, a fight in which the very future of American media might hang in the balance.
But whatever else it may be, the Huffington Post is not a left-wing Drudge Report. It is instead, you might say, both a lot more than Drudge and quite a bit less. It's not the disaster a riled Nikki Finke immediately proclaimed it to be in the L.A. Weekly (Finke, who has also written for Salon, called Huffington's new site "such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one") -- nothing that features a regular contribution from Larry David can be so quickly dismissed. But it is not revolutionary, either. Huffington's site is, quite simply, a daily news roundup married to a very big group blog (with, curiously, very few participants under the age of 40 -- and possibly 50) and little to no original reporting content; like most bloggers, Huffington's high-profile opiners are generally trolling topics well covered elsewhere.
The one "exclusive" was an excerpt from Gerald Posner's book "Secrets of the Kingdom," to be released next week, which claims that the Saudi regime has set up an internal sabotage mechanism -- "including radioactive 'dirty bombs'" -- that would "cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades" should anyone try to topple the government. Gripping stuff, but not an exclusive for very long. After all the hype, you can't help looking at the site and asking, Is that all there is?
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