After my oldest friend Tula and my former comrade Eleni at Allure magazine, Arianna Stasinopoulos Huffington is my favourite Greek. Whether or not you agree with the politics or even the editorial strategy of her site The Huffington Post, it has quickly become one of the most influential websites in America. She’s created a business model that big companies like AOL struggled for years to make – which is probably why it finally decided to just go ahead and buy her site.
I’m going to be writing for the HuffPost and I went to the UK launch party last night with my BritMums co-founder Susanna Scott, which drew a crowd of politicos, journalists and bloggers, digital media folk and Toby Young. Beforehand we mingled with digital agency Made by Many‘s Tim and Charlotte (with her long, red curls Charlotte looks spookily like Rebekah Wade – which made her a bit nervous). Everyone then watched a wide-ranging debate among Arianna, Alastair Campbell, Shami Chakrabarti, Richard Bacon, Celia Walden and, um, Kelly Osbourne. Behind the panelists was an animated (but moderated) Twitter wall that continuously updated during the discussion.
This made for fun and often amusing reading during the event, although it became hard to concentrate on the discussion. The consensus at the drinks party afterward was that it was a fabulous idea but it would have been better to turn it off to focus the attention on the speakers.
Of course, then we wouldn’t have seen great tweets from folks such as Guido Fawkes, political campaigner Will Straw (who I’d seen just hours earlier on a panel I did at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Conference), Guardian journo Viv Groskop and loads of others.
A Modern Mother and I tweeted throughout. It seemed she was “on the big screen” every few minutes. Meanwhile I was tweeting mostly things like this:
Yet the one that was on the big wall and read out by moderator Bacon was this one:
My moment of fame.
Debate between the panelists and between attendees who later sipped wine and beer in front of a panaromic view at the Millbank Tower ranged from phone hacking to whether the HuffPost “gets” the British mindset to where bloggers sit in the media landscape and should they write for free.
I’ll be contributing to the Huffington Post so look out for links to my posts here and on my Twitter stream. In the meantime, here’s a quick look at the event.
VERY jealous of your Huff appointment. Good luck!
Thanks for the shout-out! The feeling is mutual. And I bet you and Arianna will never eat lamb chops and drink wine out of plastic water bottles in the mountains of Greece while discussing breastfeeding. Or maybe I’m wrong? Also, sounds like you have a v. cool mother in law. Nice post on the writing retreat–and great idea! Can’t wait to read your HuffPo stuff.