The Huffington Post: From a Small Blog to Pulitzer Prize Winner
Another small and insignificant (!) website on that Time list for 2009 was another of our profiled Newbies from 2005, The Huffington Post.
Started by political commentator Arianna Huffington, the blog quickly established itself as the go-to destination for political news and commentary.
Politically liberal leaning, the site quickly moved beyond politics to become a mainstream online publisher reporting on news, entertainment, business, lifestyle and more.
HuffPo (as it’s affectionately nicknamed) was acquired in 2011 by TechCrunch owner and media giant AOL (who in turn was swallowed up by telecommunications giant Verizon in 2015) for $315m.
It won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, making it the first commercially run, digital media enterprise to win the highest honour in journalism – a ground-breaking feat given that there is still a credibility debate between online and traditional media in many circles.
Each of these new media figures is now a huge global corporation, determining large parts of what we do and how we think online. It’s hard to imagine that all 5 were once “Newbies” and it all started in the year 2005.