Splash Mountain: An Oral History Of The Headlines That Made HuffPost

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In the early 2000s, the headline as commonly understood was more than a century old. But outside the colorful confines of the tabloid and alternative press, its full potential as a tool for distilling the grit and drama of the world around us was too often untapped.

That didn’t all change when The Huffington Post launched 20 years ago today. Nor was HuffPost the only news outlet in those frantic years to radically reimagine the relationship between journalism and the headlines that served it. But at a time when the internet was still shaking off its dial-up shackles, the website that Arianna Huffington and her cofounders created made an indelible mark on a digital news landscape still then in its infancy.

And there was perhaps no better symbol of the changes to come than The Splash.

Originating in the world of print, where it refers to the main story on a newspaper’s front page, the term “splash” at HuffPost denotes much the same — a big banner headline, a carefully chosen image, the first thing you see when you load up the page — but with one crucial wrinkle: a distinct and unapologetic point of view. It wasn’t long after the site’s launch that the splash became HuffPost’s calling card, distinguishing it from the more buttoned-up newspapers and networks it hoped to supplant.

The story of the splash — told in interviews with nearly 30 current and former HuffPosters and longtime media observers — is a window into the transformation of the news media over the past two decades.

That story starts in defeat.

The Left’s Drudge

And so it went: George W. Bush, presiding over two wars and an economy still hung over from the delirium of the dot-com bubble, bested John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, securing a second term in office.

At the time, Arianna Huffington was most famous as a columnist and commentator who, appalled by Bush’s right-wing governance, mounted an independent campaign for governor of California — and lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the other end of the country, Kenneth Lerer was a PR-pro-turned-businessman who rose to prominence at AOL and escaped that company’s infamous acquisition of Time Warner relatively unscathed. Both now committed members of the liberal elite, they were each looking for a way to make a difference. And there was one name on both of their minds: Matt Drudge.

Drudge exploded onto the national political scene when his website, The Drudge Report, landed a bombshell scoop on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. His unabashedly conservative slant on the news — delivered exclusively through ingeniously crafted headlines — augured a new era of partisan media. When Bush won four more years in the White House, many came to view Drudge as a kingmaker.

Roy Sekoff (founding editor, HuffPost, 2005-2016): So, in the beginning, God, or Arianna, or Kenny, said “Let there be Huff—” No. [Laughs]

Whitney Snyder (HuffPost editor-in-chief): Nowadays there’s the whole Joe Rogan conversation: Has the right figured out the attention economy in a way that Democrats haven’t? The 2004 version of that was, the internet’s becoming [more important]. It wasn’t so much that people were getting all their news on the internet, but more that all the news organizations that were primarily reaching people through print and TV, they were getting their cues from the Internet. And in particular, there was a sense that Drudge was becoming the media’s assignment editor.

Alex MacCallum (senior news editor, 2005-2007; corporate counsel, 2010-2011): I briefly worked at CNBC on Tina Brown’s show. The producers on TV shows would go to Drudge for stories all the time.

Nico Pitney (DC bureau chief, 2007-2010; managing editor, 2011-2012; vice president, product, 2013-2015): When you understand that some very high proportion of people get their information from a very tiny dose of content — they’re not necessarily reading the full story, let alone even the initial few paragraphs, they’re getting the headline — then you can understand or appreciate the importance of that headline to shift people’s opinions about the world. And Drudge was doing it. He was fast and very clever and creative about the stories that he plucked out and made prominent. He was so good at it that it not only attracted this vast audience on the right, but among elite audiences, lawmakers, media people and people on the left as well.

It was almost, in a sense, a precursor to social media and how journalism has been affected by that. How many people get the gist of the story from a tweet and don’t consume it? Drudge’s headlines were essentially Drudge’s tweets about the news. I think that format proved so powerful and yet so few other outlets really jumped on it. There were some headline pages — that was fairly common — but with few resources. It was a lot of small ideological outlets with nonprofit or bootstrap money.

Sekoff: After the 2004 election, there was one famous meeting of much of progressive Hollywood [at Huffington’s home in Los Angeles]. Larry David, Rob Reiner, Norman Lear — just a lot of progressive people sitting around, going, “Well, what do we do to make this not happen again?” And, in my memory, Laurie David said, “Well, we need our own Drudge.”

Ben Smith (editor-in-chief, Semafor, in his book “Traffic,” 2023): Amid all the power players in that room, Arianna and Kenny turned out to be the ones who mattered most to what would come next. They shared an obsession with Drudge, a reclusive, gay Washington gadfly who had built his one-page site into the biggest and most important thing on the political internet, sprinkling just enough fresh gossip and witty headline writing on top of a quirky and partisan selection of links. He was the single most important force in traffic to news articles in America, driving some forty thousand views for a link in small Courier font on his site, and as many as a million — an unthinkable number, enough to crush most servers — for a big headline on the top of the page. [...] Kenny and Arianna wanted that kind of power, for themselves and for Democrats. Over the next few days, they resolved that they would build it together.

The core idea that emerged from early conversations would leverage Lerer’s deep knowledge of the political and media worlds and Huffington’s sharp editorial instincts and preternatural talent for bringing influential people together. The Huffington Post would be a political news destination, but also a place to find the thoughts and opinions of public figures — politicians, experts, celebrities — recruited by Huffington and published in a still-emerging format called “the blog post.”

The blog — which early on would feature voices such as comedian Larry David, then-U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine and TV news legend Walter Cronkite — would be the early selling point for HuffPost, but punchy political headlines would become its trademark.

Sekoff: We knew we wanted to have a site that was strongly branded. If you took CNN, The New York Times, MSN, Yahoo News, whatever the guys were at the time, and you took away the signage and all the branding and you just look at the headlines, our supposition was they’re all pretty much the same.

We were not going to be the “view from nowhere.” We were going to have a point of view and voice and attitude. Our supposition was, take away the branding, the design, just show the headline and you’re going to go, “Oh, I’m on HuffPost.”

To help achieve this marriage of pop and politics, Huffington and Lerer recruited two more cofounders. One was Jonah Peretti, now the CEO of HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed Inc., but then just an internet wunderkind with a penchant for mischief. The other, perhaps ironically, was an irascible conservative firebrand who came straight from The Drudge Report.

Jonah Peretti (HuffPost cofounder): The early design of the site was in many ways kind of accidental and political, because there were different people who wanted different things to be included, and I was tasked with bringing it together into a product. Arianna really cared about the blog, and Kenny really cared about the news. He was really obsessed with Drudge, and we recruited Andrew Breitbart, who was the guy putting up the headlines at Drudge.

Sekoff: Interestingly enough, Arianna had been closely associated with Andrew, who was the second half of Drudge. He ran Drudge for half the time. It was Drudge, but it was also Andrew. Obviously he became something very different, but Andrew at the time was someone who loved stirring shit, whatever the side. Yes, he was more on the conservative side of things, but he was a shit-stirrer. And if that meant shit-stirring in favor of something that was against the conservatives, he still loved it.

He was built for the Internet. He was Mr. ADD. He’d do 10 things at the same time. I actually was incredibly fond of Andrew from my time working with him. He did a lot of research for Arianna at a certain point, because he was insanely good at it. We couldn’t find a thing, and you’d say, “Andrew, we can’t find this thing.” And like 10 minutes later, “This?” And you’d go, “Yeah, that.”

MacCallum: Kenny and Arianna had hired Andrew Breitbart to run the splash page. I ended up being Andrew’s kind-of-deputy. And before we launched, we had all of these practice days that we did. Kenny was overseeing the news, and Arianna was overseeing the group blog at the very beginning. So Kenny was overseeing the splash page. Andrew trained me up on his system for how he curated the Internet and made Drudge a destination for people.

He had, basically, a set of RSS feeds, and he combed everything from national papers to global [papers]. He really loved U.K. papers. Mid-sized metros. Local papers. Other aggregators. Blogs. I mean, this is before Twitter existed. He had at least 50 different sources that, in this RSS reader, he would quickly be able to go through, look at the headlines and see if there was something interesting from around the world.

Peretti: Kenny would describe him as an idiot savant of internet news. He loved that Andrew knew things, like when U.K. publications would file stories. Andrew actually knew things like what is the URL path so that before they would even put it on their homepage, he could refresh a page and then see that an article appeared — and then he could link it on Drudge before it was even on that publication’s page.

And because of the time difference, he would have these stories up that would blow up and be ahead of everyone. It was that kind of internet knowledge, and then the linking of stories, that Kenny really valued. And Andrew did show the HuffPost team how to do that.

Sekoff: I’ll say this about Andrew: The dude was a firehose of ideas. And I’d say 90% of them were terrible or crazy or untenable, and 10% were the most brilliant thing you’ve ever heard of. He knew his shit. Our interactions during that HuffPost time were like, “Hey, say that again. No, stop with the credit card thing. No, the credit card thing’s fucking stupid. Go back to the other thing.”

I was not a child of the Internet. Arianna had her own site where her columns were, but it wasn’t an internet-y thing. Andrew lived and breathed the Internet.

MacCallum: He had a hotspot that plugged into his computer — years before people were using hotspots, this was 2005 — and he was connected to the Internet on his laptop at all times, talking a million miles an hour, while editing.

Katharine (“KZ”) Zaleski (senior news editor, 2005-2009): I had one very long conversation with Andrew. This was when I was going to interview for the job. He was in the office. Kenny had this big office space in this loft building. I think Andrew just talked for like an hour, and he went on about, like [mock-derisive tone] “The Priuses!” He would just have these crazy non sequiturs over the course of the hour, and then I went back to sit with Alex. She showed me an email or said that Kenny had been emailing her like, “Oh my god, will he please stop talking to both of you?”

On May 9, 2005, HuffPost was born.

Peretti: Arianna — this was her style always — she would just say stuff in the press, like “We’re going to launch on this day.” And then everyone would be like, “What the fuck! That wasn’t the plan!” It’s a little bit of this reality distortion field, where then it’s like, “OK, fuck, we’ve got to figure out how to launch it by this date.”

That initial launch of the front page was very rushed, and it was trying to put all these ideas together that were coming from Kenny, from Arianna, from Andrew and then from me, trying to make it look like something that the tech community and the blogging community would like.

Soon after launch, Breitbart began to wear out his welcome.

Sekoff: Andrew did love fucking with people, and he did love stirring shit. Arianna loved that too. But not the point of view. And I think, to be frank, at the end of the day, that’s why he was gone by June. He thought he was going to be in charge of the news. And Kenny was like, “I’m not putting my money up so the guy from Drudge can decide what the stories are.” And that was pretty quick. We launched in May, and by the middle of June, it was pretty clear that that was not going to work. Because Andrew wanted to be the “executive producer” of HuffPost.

Zaleski: Kenny had enough of Andrew pretty quickly. Andrew was in L.A. Kenny’s the kind of guy who wakes up at 6 in the morning and is raring to go. And Andrew wasn’t waking up till like noon Kenny’s time and had this whole system and yada yada yada.

Peretti: Kenny is a very savvy guy. I would rarely call Kenny naive. But I think in this case, Kenny was a little naive. He thought that Andrew wasn’t a real conservative, that he lived in L.A., he was socially liberal in a lot of ways, and that he was going to basically get on board with the political slant of HuffPost. And Andrew always thought — maybe also a little naively — that HuffPost would be a publication for all different voices. He had, like, John Lott from the American Enterprise Institute and a few other people like that, he was inviting them to blog. And Kenny was like, “Why the fuck are you putting this right-wing thing on?”

And when he would write the links on HuffPost, he couldn’t do it because he would write it in a tortured tone, because he didn’t agree with the political slant of the stories. U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, I think, was one of the early things where Andrew was like “I like everything about him except his mustache.” He would end up writing kind of a tortured, slightly positive link to an article about him. Then it would be like “What the fuck is this article?”

It clearly wasn’t working. The idea to buy him out was pretty early on.

Ken Lerer (HuffPost cofounder): Andrew was friends with Arianna. I met him through Arianna. He was not going to run the page, but he was going to be a key player on the edit side. Very quickly it became apparent that he was not the right guy at all. He wasn’t a factor in Huffington Post at all. If anything, he was a negative.

Sekoff: I loved Andrew as a person. Fucking very funny. Loved pop culture, loved sports. We didn’t see each other that often once HuffPost launched because we were just all so busy, but there’d be times I’d run into him and we’d start talking about movies, we’d start talking about our families, we’d start talking about the Dodgers, and like 20 minutes in, I’d go, “God, I fucking love this guy! Why don’t I see him more?” And then he’d pivot and say something about the radical left conspiracy, and I’d go, “Oh, that’s why.”

Lerer: He was a nice enough guy. He wasn’t my cup of tea. But he was a nice enough guy. But it became apparent very early on that what he said he wanted to do, he didn’t do. In and out within a couple of months.

Arianna Huffington (HuffPost cofounder and editor-in-chief, 2005-2016): Andrew was part of the team that helped launch HuffPost, and while we didn’t always agree on the issues, I always appreciated his instinct for tapping into the cultural moment, the zeitgeist. He wasn’t afraid to provoke or surprise. That sensibility influenced how we approached the splash: it wasn’t just about reporting the news, but sharing it in a conversational way, the way you’d share news with a friend. Those values became part of our DNA.

After leaving HuffPost, Breitbart set about solving a problem he had encountered working for Drudge. The Drudge Report was a traffic behemoth but relied exclusively on links to other publications, forgoing any additional page views — and thus revenue — from hosting articles in-house. He founded Breitbart News as a way to monetize the traffic the Drudge Report generated. His star rose in conservative media — arguably reaching its zenith when he hijacked a press conference called by then-Rep. Anthony Weiner at the height of the media firestorm over illicit photographs Weiner had sent to women on Twitter. Breitbart died suddenly on March 1, 2012.

Breitbart’s departure from HuffPost might have been more disruptive, but the site had already hired two young journalists, Alex MacCallum and Katharine Zaleski, who became the site’s first two front-page editors.

Zaleski: I was on a bit of a vision quest in India after working the overnight shift at CNN for the morning show as my first job out of college and [being] miserable. My now-husband and I did that, and when I came back, I was slowly looking for jobs. My friend Alex McCallum, who I grew up with, we were just emailing, and she said to me, like, “Oh, I’m working on this thing called The Huffington Project.”

I was living at home at my parents’ house at the time. My job at CNN had been managing the graphics on the morning show. And it was just an incredibly stressful job. I would get there at 2 in the morning and — the yelling in the control room. There were literally shoes flying. All these things that would be written up today. You’d be all over Twitter for having been abusive. But it was just normal broadcast news stuff back in the day.

I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I didn’t even know if I wanted to go back into journalism. Alex and I talked, maybe we went for a walk or something, and she told Kenny that she talked to me because Kenny knew me, because he had very recently moved into my parents’ building. So when I bumped into him in the hallway of the building and I was like, “Oh, I just talked to Alex.” And I showed him how keen I was.

Sekoff: In the very beginning, it was a little bifurcated. Everybody was involved in everything, but Arianna and I were trying to figure out this insane 500-person blog, and, “How do we teach Walter Cronkite to blog?” And New York — Kenny and KZ and Alex MacCallum — they were working on the news side.

Lerer: The three of us worked totally together. I probably talked to both of them 20 times a day. I mean, no joke. They would come up with a story, they would send me an email or however we communicated, and we edited, and then we put it up as a splash. They were the two key people.

Zaleski: I started on a Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. Alex and I went out to party out on Long Island, as one does at the age of 23. We were like a year out [of college]. I remember we really partied hard. And I left my flip phone. I’m telling you all these details because they’re just so ridiculous. And I just woke up thinking I was kind of at a regular job. I had the weekend. And I realized that I had left my phone at this party that I’d come home at like 3 in the morning from. And somehow Arianna had found my parents’ phone number. And I had gone down to the beach, and my mother comes running down. She’s like, “Arianna Huffington’s on the phone!” And I’m like, “What?!” It’s just so old school. But I got on the phone — and this might have happened a little bit later, I don’t want to be an imperfect narrator, but it’s just to show you the whole picture — I go over and she tells me something like, “We need the headlines changed!” And I was like, “Oh, OK. Uh wow. OK. I’m doing this. I’m the front page all the time.” And then I find Alex, and then Alex is like “Yeah, we got to go back.” [The woman at the party house] was like “Your phone was ringing all the time. I’m so glad the battery is out.”

MacCallum: Katharine and I basically split up a 24/7 news cycle. We managed to cover the whole week and the weekend by taking different shifts.

Zaleski: We would flip. Alex devised it so that — and this is now why she’s pretty much running CNN — one person would do the morning from 9 to 12, or like 7 to 12, and take a break, and that would allow either one of us to then go out the night before and sleep in a little bit. But we would have to update the page until 11 p.m. It was this crazy schedule. And it worked so well because we were such old friends and I had gone to high school with her now-husband. We understood each other, right?

MacCallum: First thing in the morning, Kenny would have a bunch of feedback on, you know, story placement, what went where, how we were framing something. “This headline is no good. Choose a different one.” “This story is no good. Get rid of it. Let’s do something else.” “We missed this or that.” “We’re not doing this, let’s do this.” Or he’d be like “This is amazing!” Which was also really helpful, and you would kind of have it in mind to do more of that. Story by story, he would comb through the whole thing first thing in the morning. And then twice a day, he would do a really deep-dive comb-through. And then over the course of the day, weigh in if something came up.

Zaleski: We loved Kenny and we loved the project, and Arianna we wanted to impress. So we really made it happen. We never once complained about being overworked or quitting. It wasn’t even a possibility. We grumbled, of course. We kept begging Kenny for some help on the weekends, because we had no lives. And then somehow we convinced [founding blog editor] Colin Sterling to take on the weekend shift. I’m just laughing because it was actually kind of abusive. Because he was already doing the blog.

Making A Splash

Looking back at the original front page of The Huffington Post, one thing in particular sticks out: There was no splash.

Splashes were a key element of Matt Drudge’s success. At The Drudge Report, a few short words written in all-caps font underneath a strategically chosen image could be wielded to devastating effect. HuffPost didn’t have anything like it — yet.

Ken Lerer was determined to change that.

Lerer: It was a gut decision. G-U-T. It wasn’t anything but a gut decision. If you remember Drudge at the time — I don’t even know if Drudge is still around — but he had a sort-of splash. So it just made sense to me to do a splash. It got the most attention. We could pick the story of the day or the story of the minute or the story of the hour. It was easy for people to cut-and-paste [to share it]. Not a whole lot of thought went into it. It just made sense to me.

Snyder: If you go back and look at old Drudges, he really is just a stunning headline writer and incredible photo editor, picks these amazing images.

Pitney: HuffPost always had this tabloid element to it. I don’t know that they had designed it to be. The first site design was a little more like a web magazine. Because of the Drudge influence, they wanted that from the beginning, but the site design didn’t totally allow them to get there. And pretty quickly, within months, they had created enough redesigns to allow that to be a part of it.

Zaleski: The first splash came four or five months in. I think we didn’t have that format until later. And it was probably around 2006 that the stats were introduced and we realized that the splash really performed.

MacCallum: When HuffPost was launched, there was a lot of public talk about the blog concept. But very quickly, the thing that people were clicking on was the splash.

Huffington: We always wanted HuffPost to be in conversation with readers, and the splash became the way we told them what matters most right now. It was how we conveyed surprise, drama and a sense of occasion. And it gave HuffPost an identity that was distinct: serious about the news but never self-serious.

Zaleski: One of Kenny’s premises was, we’re like the New York Post, but with more of a political focus and obviously a different take on things. I was playing with the splash once, and I remember he called and said, “Bigger. Bigger. Bigger.” So I was literally coding the letters. And he loved it. And you would start seeing it screen-grabbed and put up on TV shows. People would talk about them on TV shows.

Peretti: Kenny was always wanting to splash bigger. The way he thought of it was, the splash was HuffPost’s way of playing in the media. So it got bigger. And there were fights — that Kenny usually won: The fight to get the splash to go across the whole screen, and to push the blogs down; the fight to have the splash be big and push ads down below the fold. And that was one where, once we had ads, the business team was like, “There’s a huge splash, and you don’t see any ads.” Because the ad was right below the splash. So that became a thing, where Kenny was like, “Well, if it’s a big news story, then I’m gonna just push the ad down. I don’t care.” Of course that happened more often than the business team would like.

Huffington: Kenny would spend hours sometimes perfecting the perfect splash. There was a spirit of experimentation in those early days — a sense that we were building something new, and every splash was a chance to put a stamp on the day. And it was energizing to collaborate with the many young journalists in our newsroom who shaped the site and fine-tuned our editorial voice.

MacCallum: I do very distinctly remember — and this isn’t a Huffington Post story originally — but the Times had an investigation on the National Security Agency wiretapping Americans, and that was something we put as the top splash for multiple days. Kenny I remember feeling really strongly that that was a real break with the public trust. And I do think one thing that happened with that story being so prominently featured on Huffington Post for multiple days was, it was just in the conversation again. The Times broke that story, but it was not necessarily on the Times’ page for as long as it was on The Huffington Post. Every update to it was very prominently featured over the course of a week or whatever it was.

Sekoff: I don’t want to sound self-serving, but I think the earliest days were a little more, “Here’s a story that we think is important.” And then, I don’t know, six months, five months in, it kind of became, “Hey, this real estate should be more than just, we think this is important.” This could be a key thing that defines our brand, that defines what HuffPost sounds like, that authorial voice.

What began to emerge from HuffPost’s early experiments with the splash was a distinct style and sensibility, one that would soon become its trademark — typically incisive, often funny, occasionally profane — speaking to readers in a manner that reflected not just a particular way of looking at the world, but also an outsider’s willingness to jettison the unwritten rules of old-school journalism.

The editors who originated the splash’s signature voice look back now and wonder: Why was nobody else doing this?

Jack Mirkinson (media editor, 2011-2014): The real insight of the splash was that it was important not just to put the story out, but to present it in a way that was going to land with people. The splash was really good at doing that because you had to put forward a very simple idea in just a few words that would be representative of the story but also grab people. Everything had to work together. The headline had to reflect the picture. The picture had to reflect the headline. Everything had to be a cohesive whole.

Danny Shea (media editor, 2007-2011; various other roles, including editorial director, 2011-2016): The other core idea was, you never know what paragraph the lede is in. And you remember, at first [HuffPost] was an aggregator. The original reporting was the take on the story. Often we would dig into the 14th paragraph and find the damning detail or the damning quote and make that our headline, our splash. And that was really a key differentiator in terms of finding the talking point, finding the thing that will really sell the story and illustrate its impact and the weight or the gravity or the hilarity or whatever of it all.

Nick Sabloff (associate news editor and world editor, 2007-2010; editorial director, international, 2011-2017): There was a kind of curatorial idea, not just “What is the latest news” but what’s a way we might be able to have an angle and a little bit of voice on it.

Zaleski: “Can you believe this crap?” was the line. That was the line. “Can you believe this?!” Which, because it worked so well, now everybody has the “can you believe this?” voice. But the timing for us was so great then, because that wasn’t the case then. Our competition was Drudge, the New York Post, not even the Daily Mail yet.

Shea: News with an attitude was kind of the whole idea, and obviously it’s quite pervasive now, but it really wasn’t then.

Sekoff: The whole point was a punch in the fucking gut, right? We loved that, and we wanted to embrace that, and we wanted to bring that to HuffPost. And I think that came to define the splash.

Peretti: Kenny was a crisis-comms guy. His goal was always to make a splash that would cause trouble, that would cause someone in the White House, or someone at a company or, you know, some senators to be like, “Did you see what the HuffPost splash is?” And have it basically move behavior the next day. It was trying to be a day ahead, trying to frame the splash in a way that caused powerful people to essentially have to read HuffPost every day and take notice, and sort of fear the publication. And also to be populist and get lots of clicks from readers. But I think sometimes that was a secondary goal. He had this populist sort of way of framing things. But it was framing it in a way that the powerful people would understand that there were high stakes here and get their attention. It was a way of getting elites to read HuffPost every day.

Smith: The splash was sort of an editorial triumph from when Kenny was really writing it. The funny thing is that, what made Huffington Post so great was that in the very beginning, Jonah had a really unbelievably strong kind of technical and intuitive sense of what the audience wanted. And Kenny had a really great sense of how to drive elites insane. And Arianna had this incredible network and this incredible way of telling a story about the whole thing. It was actually very valuable and important. So it made them a good team.

But I do think Huffington Post did this thing I always tried to do [when I was running] BuzzFeed of, we’re going to reach a mass audience. But then we’re gonna use that mass audience to needle and penetrate the elite conversation. That’s what the great tabloids do. That’s what the New York Post does. That’s the tabloid dream, is that you have a mass mobilized audience, but are also totally, in a very subtle way, plugged into the elite conversation and playing those things off each other. What made it so relevant is you’re like, “Oh this is a big homepage, and oh my god, they’re driving this crazy story about Hillary Clinton or whatever.”

Sekoff: In the middle of 2007, I was going to New York one week every month. We were expanding. Suddenly we had an office, we had a newsroom, we had real shit happening. We had verticals. We had editors. We had junior editors. So I started coming a lot more. Arianna and I would trade off — she would go, then I would go. We were trying to keep our hands in the middle of it. But I was on a plane flying to New York, and the person next to me said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Oh, I’m the editor of The Huffington Post.” And they were like, “Huh, what’s that?” And, I tell the story that it’s on the flight back, but it was probably a month later. But I’m on the flight back, and the person sitting next to me says, “What do you do?” I say, “I’m the founding editor of The Huffington Post.” And they say, “Huffington Post is my fucking favorite. It’s my homepage. I go there 10 times a day. You’ve got me addicted!” You know, OK, here we go.

The Wild West

Zaleski: We were a very hybrid company, in the sense that Arianna had to be traveling around. Kenny did not want to sit in an office, and I do not blame him at all. Roy was in L.A., too. So, you basically had like the inmates running the asylum, which was me and a couple other people downtown.

Katherine Thomson (entertainment editor and senior editor, 2007-2010): Arianna wouldn’t be there very much. She’d be in California or traveling or speaking. She was already in a fantastic way a caricature of what she was.

There was one public bathroom for the whole floor. You’d have to walk down the hall and it was shared with like eight other offices. And she broke her foot or hurt her ankle at some point, and she was on crutches, and she’d come in. She had her BlackBerry tucked into her bra, with the earphones on the string still, obviously. So the string would be coming up, and she’d be talking on the phone, crutching around. And I remember once she crutched into the bathroom in the stall next to me, and she just kept talking. She’s on the phone being Arianna, and fabulous, on crutches, talking on her phone tucked into her bra in the bathroom, completely didn’t give a— in the best way.

MacCallum: It was a really fun office space. It was a very cool kind of loft. And everybody sat together in a room. We shared the office space with Thrillist. Kenny’s son, Ben, had started a company called Thrillist, and Thrillist was a young, 20-something men’s guide to New York City, going out and having fun in New York City. And The Huffington Post was obviously this much more serious news outfit. I remember very distinctly, I think the Thrillist team was sent pot brownies at one point that were in the communal kitchen. We were having these serious conversations about whatever story, and the Thrillist team was having a lot more fun.

Thomson: It was so fun and it was so different. I don’t know if anyone’s spoken to, like, how many people were in that one room at 560 Broadway. It was like one floor, one big room. When I started it was 12 people, 14 people, then we moved floors and it was 30 people, 40 people. And we’d all have lunch together at the table every day. All five tech people, all 11 editors. I mean, there weren’t many people. People had so much in common. I mean, there are like four married couples. Eight people are married from like the original 20-something, 30-something in 2008. That’s wild. People just got along, and you finally felt like you found these people who were smart and funny and interested in kind of weird stuff, and didn’t want to go be a banker or a lawyer, or had been for like a year and then didn’t. This was not ever something I would have thought I would be doing. It was the Wild West.

As the website grew in stature, it was finally time to branch out beyond politics — and beyond the front page. Soon, top decision-makers were discussing how to launch new sections, called “verticals,” for other coverage areas.

Zaleski: We actually hired a managing editor who came in after Alex left, I think it was the fall of 2006. She worked with Jonah on expanding the site. That’s when people were hired to come in and do the separate verticals beyond the homepage. There was a lot of resistance against that too, by people who will never tell you that, and I can’t give you their names, it’s too embarrassing. But, there were a lot of people who were like, “We’re going to die if we do this,” who just thought it was too much. And Kenny and Jonah really pushed for it.

Peretti: We were in an election. The traffic was great because we were a political site during an election. The site was hot, and we were a threat to The New York Times. It was a period where digital insurgents were really taking a lot of mindshare. But we were pretty terrified that after the election there would be a big decline in audience, because there would no longer be the drama of the political season.

Nick Graham (senior news editor, 2007-2011; head of video, 2011-2016): When I joined, the site had just evolved from like straight-up liberal Drudge where there were just links. It was a front page and just links. And now there was a homepage and five verticals, the original five, which were Politics, Business, Media, Entertainment and Living — which, man, Arianna jumped on that really early.

Thomson: The summer 2007 launches. Make it a “real” newspaper. And they had employed a ridiculous “managing editor” — British BBC vibe to her — who thought she would “approve our stories.” That died fast and she didn’t last.

Zaleski: I felt very threatened by her, and, admittedly, owe her an apology 20 years later, and would definitely give her that apology. But she lasted for about six months. She tried very hard to make us into a more professional organization, more structured. It just didn’t work. There were just too many lines of communication.

Snyder: There were a few people who really influenced me at HuffPost. Two of them were Danny Shea and Katherine Thomson. They were just, like, shameless tabloid people. Danny ran the HuffPost Media page. We had all these sections with their own front pages, and HuffPost Media had a really great voice. It was really punchy. There was good alliteration. Not afraid to take a shot at someone. And Katherine’s overriding interest was, “Is this interesting?” with potentially no other considerations. And it being ethically questionable, or making people uncomfortable, is almost an advantage at times.

Thomson: OK, I’ll take that as a compliment. Yeah, that sounds like me. That’s the nicest — I think I love that.

Sekoff: Katherine Thomson was a legend. She was another one who was a child of whatever that internet vibe is. She obviously became the editor of the Daily Mail. She was tough, you know, and she was crazed in the sense of going to get traffic. She was the one who was pushing the limits more than anybody.

Thomson: I pushed the limits because I wanted traffic. It was just greed. And it was competitive because we got real-time analytics. That took years after I got to the Daily Mail that we started doing that, and it felt like, “How are you not doing this?” How can you not see after five minutes how something’s doing and where traffic is coming from and what’s going to click better on the homepage. That was a really novel thing. Everyone got competitive, and it was just greed. And also, you want to entertain people. People are going to care more about Lindsay Lohan sideboob than John Cusack’s latest political movie, it turns out. So do sideboob.

Peretti: Maybe not the kind of thing you put in an anniversary [tribute], but there was some controversy and frustration around the fact that we did have a lot of, like, maybe horny older guys reading HuffPost who were interested in politics but would really click on, like, Lindsay Lohan stories, if she was in, you know, an Oscar dress. So entertainment had stories that were a little bit sexy, definitely would get clicked, it would just torch the click meter. We used to have this click meter with all the stories, and there’d be a big splash [at the top of the meter] and then there’d be this kind of salacious story that would just be going like that [gestures up] on the click meter.

That’s when I coined the phrase “the mullet strategy.” The joke was that the mullet is business up front, party in the back. So HuffPost used a mullet strategy where it was business up front — serious politics and political news — but then there was the party in the back, the entertainment content and internet memes and funny stuff, a little bit more salacious and tabloidy.

One key pillar of HuffPost’s expansion: building out a real politics team — with reporters and everything — and a D.C. bureau to go along with it. Nico Pitney, founding editor of the Center for American Progress’ news website, ThinkProgress, was tapped to head up the new office.

Pitney: Working at a news outlet before HuffPost, and seeing the impact of what would happen when HuffPost linked to us and it would crash our site — that was a draw, you know? Wow. They were not only getting publicity from having celebrity bloggers, but they were building a real firehose that they could turn on whatever topic they wanted on a given day. That was a lot of power.

Zaleski: Nico was a little bit more of a long hire. We worked with him through the Center for American Progress, and he would always send us stuff, and then make headline suggestions. So after a while, I was like, “OK, I should put him in front of Arianna and Kenny as someone who should just work with us.”

Jason Linkins (media and politics reporter, 2007-2017): The first era of the HuffPost D.C. bureau, where we had the responsibility of carrying the site’s political coverage, was a wild time. When we started, it was me, Nico Pitney and Sam Stein, in a single office with one television and a printer that we never used but for some reason carried with us from new office to new office like the luggage the Whitman brothers cart around with them in “The Darjeeling Limited.”

The early days of this, we were fully in the publish-or-perish era, where quality took a back seat to quantity. I was basically hired to do quantity — the idea being that I’d do what I’d done periodically as a long-term guest blogger at Wonkette. For a long while, I described my job as “I write dick jokes about politics” — a little self-deprecating, but I am sometimes amazed I elevated my work from that foundation. We were really running and gunning back then.

Nevertheless, we had a belief even back then that we could build out a bureau, and I always felt that everything I published was one more brick in the road to hiring more people. It took some doing, but this is, ultimately, how we did it.

Pitney: I joined when HuffPost went from being a page to having sections. But the bulk of the audience was always on the front page. So my aim was, “How can I get to play in that sandbox?” — because you have so much more ability to influence things.

Graham: During those days, the back half of ’07 through ’08, until probably mid-’09, there were really three of us that ran the homepage. Nico was always kind of the shadow homepage editor, but KZ would run it during the day, and then Nick Sabloff and I would split the night and weekend shifts. Sabloff used to do Friday night and Saturday morning, that double-shift. And I would do Saturday night, Sunday morning. It was brutal. Sometimes you wouldn’t get off until 2 a.m., then you’d be back on the page at 7 a.m. And there was a kind of insane period where Arianna wanted us to be in the office again the next day, and Sabloff and I were both like, “We’re going to die.” And she was like, “Fine, you can work from home that day.”

Sabloff: We were “The Nicks.” We were co-front page editors in the less glamorous hours.

Graham: Those early years, at least for me, were some pretty seminal news events. The ’08 elections, the financial crisis, the midterms, the Arab Spring. It was just one after another. My mother had been in the news business, so I had family friends who were in the news, and I was like, “Is this normal? Is it this crazy all the time?” And they’re like, “No, not really. This isn’t normal.” And then it just turned out that was the new normal.

As the world careened from one crisis to the next, signs of HuffPost’s rising influence became easier to spot.

Graham: One of the things we were really good at with headlines was finding the hidden nugget in a story and using that as the headline. It was like, [The Associated Press] would have this unbelievable story and the most boring headline possible, and you’d be like, “You guys are killing yourselves here.” And we would just file it and use the right headline, and it would blow the story up. That was something I prided myself on doing quite well.

When Treasury was forcing the banks to take all the capital injections — that was kind of a seminal moment. “Too big to fail.” And I was on the page that night. The financial crisis was so insane because everything would go down at like 2 a.m. before markets opened the next day. So you’d be waiting around like, “All right, what’s going to happen?” And then, bam! Something would happen.

[Former HuffPost senior editor] Marcus Baram, he was the other guy on with me that night. The Washington Post broke that the banks were being forced to take these injections. Like, there was no choice. You had to accept the money from the government. And The Washington Post wrote the story, and they put a really long, innocuous headline on it, and the story was filled with this language trying to dance around the fact that we had done this. It was the classic thing where you’re like, “Can we say this is happening? Is it too crazy to say?” Which, we find ourselves in that situation wildly now.

I remember reading that story and being like, “Holy shit, they’re forcing the banks to take all this money, which means the system is buckling in such an insane way.” I kept reading the story and I kept being like, “This is crazy. Like, they’re nationalizing the banking system. If you have to step in like this, and you are forcing banks to take this, you have nationalized this system, right?” And nobody seemed to want to say it. And I turned to Marcus, and I was like, “We have to say this. We should say this.” And Marcus was like, “OK, fine.” So I filed the story and I just linked out to The Washington Post because this was their story. They broke it. But I put up the headline, and I put up the logos of all the banks. And I just wrote — I hedged a little bit, I said “PARTIALLY NATIONALIZES BANKING SYSTEM.” And it blew up like crazy.

Back then, too, we would overwhelm sites with traffic all the time. The links would break. So you would have to check for the first hour like every 10 minutes to make sure the link wasn’t broken. So I remember I checked the first one. We started sending, you know, 20,000 views an hour, which back then was enormous, to The Washington Post. So I checked after 10 minutes, link was fine. Checked again 10 minutes later, and I was like, “Shit, they changed the story.”

What had happened was, they’d rewritten their lede to reflect what we had published. I was like, “Holy shit, man. Whoa.” That was a moment where I was like, “We are actually influential in a way that I hadn’t really understood at that point.”

Getting The Call

Pitney: Arianna and Ken Lerer — the most senior people — were involved in the minute details of almost every splash. There was a lot of focus and creativity and attention applied to these splashes. As they became a bigger part of the brand’s identity, HuffPost became better known for them.

Sabloff: There was a lot of Ken Lerer for sure, weighing in on what he thought the splashes would be. Occasionally, Arianna. On Friday nights, it would often be me and Roy. You know, you sort of got different flavors of splash depending on who was the senior editor who wanted to kick around ideas. But certainly Kenny was very involved, had great ideas for headlines, with his PR background. He would fire off an endless array of emails, always just subject lines, and then he would reply to himself with a new subject line. And if you looked away for a minute and looked back, it was like nine emails, all in the subject line, him changing his original idea and going with a different word, something like that. He was very involved and had a lot of ideas.

Pitney: It was a great opportunity for younger journalists, for years and years, to interact with the heads of the company, go back and forth with them, get feedback from them. It was a great training ground for younger people in the newsroom.

Graham: One open secret back in the early days was that Arianna owned the blog and Kenny owned the news, right? And oftentimes Arianna would ask you to do something and you’d be like, “Hey, Kenny, Arianna wants me to do this.” And he’d be like, “Don’t do that.” You would kind of have to go to dad to get mom to lay off. And, I mean, Kenny taught me so much about how to write headlines and news judgment, but he was also an utter living terror. For two years, I lived in fear of this man, because I had to call him every night with splash ideas.

Sekoff: Obviously, there would be input back and forth. “Hey Arianna, what do you think the top story should be?” Or, “Hey, we got this idea.” There was a back and forth.

Zaleski: Sometimes Arianna didn’t like things, or sometimes she liked things, and she would certainly make her voice very well heard. I would take it back to Kenny and then I would have to be the messenger — and then they would work it out.

MacCallum: Arianna would definitely call, and I must have had her number in my cellphone, but she would call from random numbers. So any time I got a call from an unknown number, I would be so nervous, thinking it was Arianna Huffington calling to tell me something about whatever was programmed on the page. It wasn’t that frequent but once in a while. So I got a call from an unknown number, and I missed it. And I was really nervous about having missed the call, because I was also very conscious to make sure I was on call all the time. I called right back, and the person didn’t pick up. And it was my now-husband, who chickened out calling me to ask me on our first date. He called me, I didn’t pick up, and then he chickened out. He didn’t leave a voicemail. And had I not called him back twice thinking he was Arianna Huffington, I don’t know if we would have gone on a first date.

Peter Banks (director of HuffPost’s front page): The first time I talked to Arianna was my first time running the page alone. This was like early 2012. It was a holiday, so I was literally the only person in the office. Whitney beforehand had warned me, “Arianna might call you.”

Joanna Zelman (front page editor and Green editor, 2010-2014): Yes! That warning. Holy shit. I got that warning. It scared the shit out of me.

Banks: He said, “If she asks you to change anything, say yes no matter what. And if there’s a problem, call me.”

Zelman: Say yes, but don’t necessarily do it.

Banks: “Say yes, and call me, and I’ll deal with it.”

Zelman: That was the exact direction I got.

Banks: And I’m really hoping she doesn’t call. I’m nervous enough as it is. So of course, like 15 minutes in, she calls. And there wasn’t any problem. It went fine. But she said, and this is pretty close to verbatim: “Jon Ward has written a story about Rick Santorum. I want us to splash it and I want you to write a sexy headline.” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, totally.” And then I got up and went to the bathroom and just kind of stared in the mirror for a couple of minutes. And by the time I got back to my desk, she was already calling again, and I had to tell her that I hadn’t written a sexy headline yet.

Graham: One of [Huffington’s] buddies was John Cusack. So she calls me. And she’s like, “Nicholas, John Cusack emailed me. He’s got a really interesting idea for a splash. I’m going to connect you.” So she CC’s me on some email thread with him, I write him back. And he responds immediately. And it was a Saturday night at like 1 a.m. So 10 p.m. on the West Coast. I’m like, “I guess we know what John Cusack’s doing on a Saturday night, right?” Which is fucking ranting to Arianna.

Mollie Reilly (managing editor, breaking news): I do remember getting thank you notes from Arianna after big elections. And it did mean a lot.

Alana Satlin (front page editor, 2011-2014; senior editor, breaking news, 2014-2019): She called me once on Christmas just to thank me for working on Christmas. It was just to say hi. That was actually super nice.

Ben Hart (front page editor, 2011-2016): I think I still have some of those Christmas sweaters.

Melissa Jeltsen (front page editor, 2011-2015; senior reporter, 2015-2021): I have one pair of pajamas still.

Hart: Yeah, they’re really durable.

Jeltsen: They were so nice.

Yes We Can

Pitney: An early initial reporting focus of HuffPost was the John Edwards affair. There was a perception among Democrats that this was a right-wing conspiracy, and the fact that HuffPost was taking it seriously and occasionally doing [splashes on it] helped give it credence.

Smith: Iraq was a big thing early on. It felt like the Democratic Party was divided over Iraq, and Huffington Post’s big influence, from my perspective, was providing a really clear anti-war voice and a really clear base for Barack Obama.

Sabloff: I think it’s fair to say HuffPost was very, um, bullish on Obama at that time. Obama being a younger, of-the-internet-era person, aligned with a kind of, maybe similar spirit to The Huffington Post as a digital upstart.

Pitney: HuffPost had great influence among Democratic activists. That was maybe at its height during the Clinton/Obama primary, when there was so much conflict and debate in the party on which direction to go. And HuffPost was absolutely pro-Obama at the time. And I think that had a significant influence in the outcome of that race.

Linkins: It was probably kismet that we were building our brand during such an exciting election season. The country was navigating toward Obama and toward coverage like ours. A lot of what HuffPost did back in those days was just experiment — learn how to talk to the internet. I think we were much quicker to the punch learning how to engage our audience than we were at speaking the language of official Washington or acting like a top media brand should.

Sabloff: I can remember one time with Kenny, John McCain had finally gone negative in the campaign. He had started saying negative stuff about Obama, which was sort of against his character. We could have just written the headline with whatever he said about Obama. That would be a straightforward way of just reporting the news. I can remember going back and forth with Kenny, and he was just working. Eventually we went with something like “MAVERICK TO MUDSLINGER” and then it was just the picture of McCain.

Zaleski: “FROM MAVERICK TO MUDSLINGER” was a memorable one that Kenny and I did during the McCain-Obama fight.

Sabloff: We could have just said, “McCain Goes Negative.” “McCain Slams Obama.” In a way that was very factual. But it was that idea of, what’s the New York Post, Drudge Report treatment of what this event meant. I remember that very vividly. How do we take the story and put an interesting spin on it.

Banks: We still have that today. Some of our best splashes are, you’re not actually saying the news. You’re saying why it matters.

Sabloff: Giving an interpretation on it. Giving that spin. Giving something really punchy and memorable.

Lerer: I remember the Obama campaign, someone from the campaign would call up and say, “Well, that’s a great splash,” or something like that. So they would look at it every day. I’m sure people would call up and say, “That’s not a good splash,” but I paid no attention to them.

In April 2008, a writer named Mayhill Fowler, working as part of HuffPost’s “citizen journalist” initiative, uncovered audio of Barack Obama at a private fundraiser speaking about small-town Rust Belt voters who, in his words, “cling to guns or religion.” The report set off a firestorm. In the late stages of a brutal primary contest, Obama was on the defensive.

Zaleski: I put up the Obama “They cling to their guns” headline. I put that up and a lot of people — friends of mine on the Obama campaign, which included my prom date, who was his speech writer Adam Frankel — hated me. [Editor’s note: HuffPost was unable to reach Frankel for comment.] It all worked in the end. We didn’t get blamed for losing the election. But there were a lot of people who were pretty upset about that. It was actually Nico, though, who pushed me to put it up, and I did it, and he was right. It was a scoop.

Pitney: I think the Mayhill Fowler story was a critical moment in HuffPost’s history. It really helped to establish us as a source for high-impact original reporting and expand the perception of our site beyond Drudge-esque headlines and our stable of bloggers. It was also a quintessential example of the complexities and competing pressures of practicing advocacy journalism with integrity.

Looking back, I think we made the right editorial calls throughout. We were right to prioritize citizen journalism and to publish a thoughtfully written and newsworthy, if politically damaging, story about Obama’s remarks and to promote it to our audience. I don’t remember any internal pushback — quite the contrary, I think people saw it as an incredible success for our citizen journalism team that was led by Amanda Michel.

Obama’s election victory concluded two years of relentless campaign coverage — and ushered in a new political era.

Sabloff: We had a real feel for that high/low of the internet. We wanted to take serious issues and treat them sometimes with humor. I can remember very distinctly we had a splash where Obama was on his vacation in Hawaii.

Graham: Katherine Thomson had an awesome one that was after the 2008 campaign and Obama was on vacation in Hawaii. He’d been working out all throughout the campaign, so he was pretty ripped, and some photographer had caught a picture of him strolling shirtless on the beach looking jacked.

Sabloff: He did, like, a Daniel Craig-walking-out-of-the-ocean thing — with, maybe relative to other presidents, an admirable physique. And our headline was just “O!”

Thomson: He’s shirtless, standing there. It was over Christmas. He had been elected but pre-inauguration. It was amazing. I mean, everyone had Obama fever, and it was such an optimistic time, and he was, like, a hot dad in his 40s. There he was, shirtless. It was the first you saw of him that buff. Everyone is so excited. “He’s amazing and gonna save us all, and god he’s got a great body too.”

I’m very pro-objectification in the right cases, and I think that’s the right case. I mean, it was utterly positive. People talk about body shaming, but there was no shaming. It was pure awe.

Lerer: The Huffington Post and the Obama election was kind of like Steve Bannon was to Trump in the first election. It had a lot of sway. It allowed the Democratic Party to really, if you will, take over the internet. And since then, that’s gone away. But it was the first mover. There was Drudge and then there was The Huffington Post.

The Big Time

HuffPost began modestly, as a group of celebrity blogs and a page full of links. By the end of the decade, it had a growing staff of reporters and editors and a ballooning roster of verticals. The rest of the media increasingly took notice of the digital upstart, and ironically enough it was because of something the site had been doing from the very beginning: sending them traffic. Only now, it was a lot of traffic.

Jeltsen: One thing I will add, just about what was unique about our homepage, is the generosity of linking out to competitor sites and having no qualms about it. We would send a shit-ton of traffic to other sites. As much as we were aggregating, we were also directly sending traffic to people because we thought they had something valuable.

Smith: I was very dialed into the blogosphere and was blogging. And this is a core thing to understand as a blogger was, who you could send the link to to get traffic. And Matt Drudge was obviously the king. Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall were very important. And then Huffington Post was a new entry in that space. Discovering the address of this guy Whitney [Snyder] was a major breakthrough for me in terms of getting traffic.

The outbound links gave Huffington Post a lot of power, because there was this sort of universe of independent and quasi-independent bloggers that I was part of, where in some sense, you would conceive your articles based on “Do I think I can get Drudge to link this? Do I think I can get Andrew Sullivan to link this?” I would be like, “Ah, this seems like a topic that Whitney might be interested in. This is a story Huffington Post is following. Let me try to advance it.” Huffington Post and Drudge in particular were very powerful assignment editors for the rest of media — at least the internet-savvier parts of it.

Snyder: Nico was running the front page, but he was about to take on a bigger role. So they needed a new front page team lead. Nico asked me if I wanted to do it. And he was basically like, “Look, things are going to be changing at the company level, and the way certain people are involved will probably be changing at that point.” Kenny had all kinds of different investments in the New York City tech scene that were doing really well. He was already less involved at that point. So I ended up doing that job.

Huffington: Whitney was extraordinary from the very beginning. He had an uncanny ability to see the story behind the story — and to translate that into a headline that popped off the screen. He brought rigor and a deep sense of mission to the front page. Under his stewardship, the splash continued to evolve but never lost that essential HuffPost spirit: bold, playful and always with a point of view.

Snyder: And then AOL bought HuffPost two months after that.

On Feb. 7, 2011 — shortly after the conclusion of Super Bowl XLV — news broke that AOL had acquired The Huffington Post in a blockbuster $315 million deal that sent shockwaves through American media.

Graham: I remember when it happened, because it was right after the Super Bowl. It was a Sunday night. I was less than sober. And I started getting all these texts. I was just like, “What is going on?” And finally a friend of mine called me and was like, “You’re getting bought by AOL.”

Smith: I was sort of an internet-media purist, sort of a utopian. I guess I sort of felt that they had sold out to this ancient conglomerate. I also had bounced off Tim Armstrong, and was kind of like, “I don’t really understand where he comes from.” I didn’t get it. Like, their idea about ads, even by then, the idea that you would just sort of reach infinite scale by scaling digital advertising seems a little, like, I didn’t get it. They threw around numbers that didn’t make sense.

Graham: We were a newsroom at that point of like 85 to 100 people. We had kind of formed a strike force, for lack of a better word — it was Nico, Whitney and me from news. We were kind of the O.G. news people. We went over to do due diligence on what it would take. Because what had not been said was, “Not only are you going to continue running news operations [for HuffPost], but we now needed to generate content for 20 to 30 smaller random sites that fed content into AOL’s homepage.” So, like, there was a pet site, right? And it was like, “Who the fuck is going to be the pets editor?” And, like, what does that even mean?

Pitney: In retrospect, even with the amount of traffic you could drive, it was never so formal. It was oftentimes 20-somethings making themselves entertained. When HuffPost was acquired by AOL, before any of the HuffPost people had met their AOL counterparts, we designed a mockup of how we were going to redo AOL’s homepage, and it was a big splash. Basically we were making it a new HuffPost. And what we didn’t know until we arrived there was, like, the immensely lucrative nature of AOL’s homepage to AOL, and how they tested, you know, pixel changes, font-size changes, the most minor, minor, minor, minor changes were tested to slices of their audience for a week or two weeks at a time before anything was changed. It was fundamentally different from HuffPost’s approach of, like, hey, let’s totally rework our homepage. We’ll try it tomorrow and see how it goes. It was such a culture clash going in there and realizing, like, no, they don’t want anything to do with our splashes. Their approach is much more scientific and tied to revenue, and I think it made all of us appreciate what we had at HuffPost.

One thing the merger meant was that more eyes than ever would be on the HuffPost front page and the splash. That meant calling in reinforcements.

Graham: There were four or five of us right up until the merger. Then it scaled up pretty quickly.

Adam Goldberg (deputy front page editor): For exactly one week to the day before the merger was announced, I was at The Huffington Post. That was on Broadway and Prince, right above Dean & DeLuca. You have to understand, nobody was working above Dean & DeLuca at the time.

Hart: Please, at least include one mention of “nobody was doing X at the time” in this oral history. It’s mandatory.

Goldberg: I was working for MySpace prior to this, so I was working for NewsCorp. I had gone to work at this giant media conglomerate and was really excited to get a job at this startup-type company at The Huffington Post. I was like, “This is great!” It’s in a loft in Soho, just this kind of startup company. Then literally one week after my start date, Arianna and Nico came in and announced that AOL had acquired us. Suddenly we were owned by America Online and I was kind of back where I started, working for a giant company. But thus began a new chapter in The Huffington Post saga.

The team grew.

Hart: It was the week after the bin Laden raid. I was hired, and then the bin Laden thing happened. I wasn’t on for that. I was on a week later. Joanna Zelman trained me. And I remember she said — I was looking at my phone while she was instructing me, and she was like, “It’s annoying when you do that.” We became friends, though.

Zelman: I was covering the page for the second time on my own when bin Laden was killed. So I was just in the office with no one else there on a Sunday night. I remember freaking ... out that I was alone. [There was] this sense that something fucking big is about to happen, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. It was a feeling of doom, just the confidence that I was going to fuck it up. I remember feeling a mass wave of relief when Whitney jumped into the front page.

And the team grew.

Jeltsen: I started in July.

Satlin: I just graduated college and then you started about a month after me. So we were all pretty quickly in.

Hart: They were hiring a lot back then.

Banks: I was like six months later, and I remember the week before I joined — I was at Salon at the time — and Alex Pareene was like, “Oh, that’s a really powerful job.” I don’t think I really understood that then.

Satlin: I didn’t really realize either. It didn’t hit me — or perhaps it did and then I got drunk with power — but I got very playful with headlines. I would do stuff below the splash like “SIDEBOOB!” with 14 exclamation points. That’d be the whole headline.

Because, really, the splash was the thing that mattered. It really made a difference whether people had their stories on the front page or not. You would look at the stats and be like, “Oh, all right, like 10,000 people are clicking this story right now.”

Hart: It’s hard to imagine that many people reading something. It never quite sinks in, especially because we weren’t dealing with readers. At least, I wasn’t. It was really just a one-way street. You put something on the page, you see the little number. It’s a huge number, and you’re just like, “Cool.”

But I certainly remember thinking, “Jeez, I have too much responsibility.” The first time I was manning the page solo, I was really like, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here.” But then the other thing is that Huffington Post was run by 23-year-olds. So it’s not like there was some stern 55-year-old standards editor being like “Here’s how we’ve done things for the last 20 years.” It was all people who were, if anything, two years older than me at most.

Jeltsen: I think I took it pretty seriously. Like, I understood the power of the page and was just worried about making a mistake. I remember telling my mom I was going to be working on the front page for election night, and she was like, “Are you sure?” [Laughs] And I was like, yeah that’s my full job. It’s fine. And just like, “Oh, maybe someone else could do it.” No!

Reilly: Truly, my most stressful days at HuffPost have been when I was asked to cover the front page. I remember the first time I was ever asked to do it was in 2012. The front team was having a team dinner. Whitney had done all the training with me, and he was like, “It’s going to be so chill. Nothing ever happens this time of night.” And then Benghazi happened.

Satlin: Looking back now, it seems crazy, but there was a lot of stuff that was on the site that was being self-published. Especially on the weekend. I was the Sunday editor, and at the time it was kind of a barebones staff. But I would write stuff, nobody would edit it, and I’m not even sure we had copy editors on the weekend at that point. It was just more accepted that you could just write and publish. It was very informal. And of course now that would not really fly.

Reilly: We were really scrappy back then.

Goldberg: In my first six months there, this is a story I’ve told a thousand times, but I had given a once-over to a story when the news broke that Betty Ford died. I published this story that described Betty Ford as Jimmy Carter’s widow. And somebody, probably one of Arianna’s friends, noticed this and clued her in on it at some point. But also, within two minutes, we had like 200 corrections. People noticed this stuff immediately, and it was terrifying. I went pale, and I was like, “I’m done. I’m going to get fired.” For me the consequences ended up being that there was a suspension, I’m not allowed to run the page for like a week, paid. So I was moved to daytime hours, which meant I could go to some HuffPost party that week at the Bowery Hotel or something.

Satlin: I don’t want to make you feel bad, Adam, but I think about that all the time.

Goldberg: Now I think HuffPost is in a general way considered part of mainstream media. But it was not, I don’t think, back then. It was more of a — I don’t want to say renegade.

Hart: An insurgent.

Goldberg: It was an insurgent website, even though we were owned by a giant company. But even the idea of a site being run by a bunch of early 20-somethings was not normal. Now you have a bunch of people who are veterans of this company at NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, all these places. It’s like we’ve infiltrated the rest of media. But that was not the case back then.

Escape Velocity

Graham: One thing I’ve thought about in the past was, like, how much was I aware of how significant this thing was.

Amanda Terkel (politics managing editor, 2010-2017; D.C. bureau chief, 2017-2023): The splash is incredibly powerful. It tells readers, and the rest of the media world, what is important to progressives at that moment. And it’s sometimes a story in itself.

Graham: Cable news was such a big part of the landscape. It was one of the main mediums before the internet came and filled a lot of that space. At night it would be me, just me in this Soho office, with the night blog editor, kind of running this website. And we would get logged into the cable news channels to see what was going on, and half of them were like, especially Fox News was like railing about some shit we said. And we would kind of look at each other and we’re like, “You know right now that’s just us, right? We are the ones responsible for this thing.”

Shea: The fear and the power and the significance of having your face on the splash was huge. We might see a member of Congress doing something bad, put their face on the splash, and that was kind of huge.

In the Media page days, it was a lot of naval-gazing, a lot of industry insiders. Kenny was really clear in the beginning: If you cover media people, people in the media tend to read you, and then they pick you up, and then they cite you. It’s an old Clay Felker strategy. The splash played a big role in getting media attention. You know, “Whose ratings are up” and “What was the biggest clip of the morning.”

I used to cover ratings a lot. In that day, TV news was definitely the thing that clicked the most, and it makes sense, those were like political celebrities. In the early days, the junkies were obsessed with the TV news, like the Keith Olbermann era, the Rachel Maddow era, Bill O’Reilly. I remember getting a call once, I think from a PR person, maybe not from the anchor whose ratings were really low, being like, “You’ve got to take this down. You’ve got to take this down. He’s freaking out over it.” And I don’t want to say who it was, because that person is still working, but every time I see them on TV, I remember that moment.

Banks: I’m assuming it wasn’t [redacted], because he would have just DM’ed you directly.

Shea: You chose a really intentionally good name.

Goldberg: I remember, I did a headline when Bill Clinton spoke at the 2012 DNC. I’m looking at it now, it’s a photo of Obama hugging Clinton, and you see the back of Clinton’s head. And it was “THE KING’S SPEECH,” which had come out a couple of years before. And Megyn Kelly was on Fox News later that night seething that “The Huffington Post is calling Obama a king” or something like that. And I’m just, like, first of all, you misinterpreted the splash. But second of all, the idea that Fox News was paying attention like it was a newsworthy event just further illustrates what kind of exposure we had.

Jeltsen: Once Twitter was more popular, too, people would tweet the splash. You would see people taking a screenshot and be like, “Interesting.” “Provocative.”

Satlin: The best part of the job was these splash brainstorms we would do. Eventually we moved them over to Slack, but we did a lot of them in person, and we did a lot of them over email. Whitney or Nick would kick it off, and then we would just brainstorm things back and forth, really riff off each other. It led to really great splashes, but it also really bonded us as a team.

Banks: There were threads that were dozens of emails long, and each email was just, like, a five-word headline or a one-word headline.

Hart: We were all in kind of the same station in life. Roughly the same age, roughly the same work experience. None of us had ever wielded this kind of influence. I don’t want to say “power,” but, you know, been at the controls of something this big before. It was fun to experience together.

Chloe Angyal (front page editor, 2015-2017; opinion editor, 2017-2019): When the splash channel was popping, it felt like it was using the best broken part of my brain, the part that remains broken to this day. I mean, there’s a reason I’ve written four books at this point, all with pun-based headlines. My brain is still broken in this very specific way, and there are still days when I’m like, I think I know what a good splash would be for this.

Goldberg: I would say, I thought my strongest headline was “MOURNING IN AMERICA.” M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G. The morning after the election. I think we were in a pitch meeting, probably two or three months before November, and almost playfully being like, “We should come up with headlines for if Trump wins.” Because at that point it did seem ridiculous.

Banks: We had a Google doc with headlines for both outcomes. And we had like 30 for Hillary winning, and that was the only one for Trump winning. Not even because we didn’t think it was going to happen. By the end, I was pretty nervous. But it was just hard to even figure out how to contextualize that kind of a black-swan event.

I remember the night of the election, a few of us were down in D.C. This was before the upper Midwest really started to come in — it was before the needle swung — and Sam Stein walked past the desks where Whitney and I were sitting, and he just goes, “You might want to start coming up with some new headlines.” That was the moment for me. I’ll never forget him saying that. Luckily we had a really good headline.

Andy Campbell (senior editor): One reason why working at HuffPost is so great, I think a lot of splashes came together when we were just sort of standing together and making jokes. When I worked at the New York Post as a writer, I tried to offer one up, and they said, “Never suggest a headline again or you’re fired.” It was, like, a sort of pun headline on a story I had written. And they were like, “Never do that again. We have a team of people that do this and they are not going to listen to you.” But at HuffPost — the front page team is so legendary at it, but there is still a camaraderie thing. We get together and put these things together as a team, and it’s really fun.

Banks: Sometimes the whole newsroom has been involved in those brainstorms. You’d throw a message in Slack and just let people rip. I’m trying to remember what were some of the times we did that. Definitely the most famous example was when Jeff Bezos came out and accused the National Enquirer of trying to extort him over dick pics. I don’t think we even needed to ask, people just started firing them off. Then [former HuffPost reporter] Hayley Miller nailed it.

Hayley Miller (blog editor, 2013-2016; senior reporter, 2016-2021): It’s hard to remember the fine details, but I’m sure it was a team effort. I remember the newsroom brainstorming Pecker-related headlines for an earlier story about him and Trump. There’s no way [former HuffPost polling editor] Ariel Edwards-Levy, one of HuffPost’s great punsters at the time, didn’t play a role in this somehow. It was a satisfying moment, to be honest — and I hope it brought joy into the lives of all who read it, perhaps even Bezos himself.

Banks: It was so good, The New Yorker wrote it up.

Miller: It was exciting to see my name in The New Yorker, especially [with] a quote in which I implied I routinely spend a good chunk of my work day spamming my colleagues with dick puns. I’m sure I made my family proud.

‘The Coat Hanger Splash’

In August 2012, the Republican Party unveiled its new platform, which included a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Following the news, HuffPost editors took a bold editorial tack.

In research for this oral history, more former and current HuffPosters mentioned the resulting splash than any other from the website’s history.

Shea: The coat hanger splash.

Banks: I remember that one being huge. It was really being talked about.

Snyder: It was such a good idea. The execution, just having it be a coat hanger. Not a coat hanger hanging in a closet. That’s the only imagery. You can sort of show and not tell. The connection between the headline and the image is sort of obvious, but the headline is very concise. It’s very minimal in its description. It’s laser-focused on one thing.

Banks: It’s a straightforward, newsy headline except for the italics.

Sekoff: To me it was the greatest, because there were no fucking words necessary. White screen. Coat hanger. Jesus Christ. I mean, to me that was the platonic ideal.

Shea: It’s funny to look back on now. It’s sad to look back on now. I don’t even know, to be honest, if I was involved in a word of the headline. Obviously the words of the headline don’t particularly matter any more in the sense of what the story is really about. I think it was probably my idea. I remember Whitney and me doing it together and me choosing the image. We wanted something that illustrated the stakes of the moment, that created … I don’t want to say shock value for shock value’s sake, but something to wake people up about the gravity of mainstreaming this platform.

Snyder: To me, what was really potent about this splash is that, I think people were in denial for a long time about the likelihood of severe abortion restrictions coming back on the table. I think we certainly saw that in the way certain Supreme Court justices decided to roll the dice and stay on the court for too long. It was this thing where, Republicans would have it be in their platform, but because of Roe, it wasn’t as central to our politics as it is now.

Shea: When you’re building a splash, you have image choices, and there’s no more visceral symbol for an era of eroding women’s rights and reproductive rights than the coat hanger. If you’re going to build a headline on a news story that’s everyday news, sure, give me a protest sign or a picture of a legislator. But this wasn’t an everyday news story. This was a huge shift in terms of mainstreaming a really reactionary and dangerous position. And we wanted to send a signal that this was really big and scary and important news, and convey the gravity of the moment. And the image choice obviously achieved that in the sense that it garnered a lot of attention.

Snyder: The coat hanger was, especially at that moment in time, a very potent visual to remind people of another time in the U.S. — to stir people’s imaginations in an awful way about what could be happening. I’m not saying no one was talking about it, but I don’t think people were talking about it enough. And to get them thinking about it is to get very blunt about what it could mean. And the beauty of it is, it’s very blunt, but it’s not gory. It’s an item we all have in our houses, mostly used for very common purposes. To me, that combination is really, really effective.

Banks: We’ve actually recycled the idea a couple of times — when Anthony Kennedy retired and when [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg died — to, I would say, diminishing marginal returns each time. And the paradigm around abortion law has shifted post-Roe in a way where the metaphor at this point is maybe outdated. It’s not back-alley abortions. It’s women going septic because doctors won’t treat them in time. But at that moment, especially, you had to reach back to, you know, pre-1973 for a visual symbol.

Shea: Pre-“Handmaid’s Tale,” pre-Dobbs. What was the single thing that symbolizes this? I’m sure there were less offensive, less visceral ways to illustrate it, but we really wanted to ensure we conveyed with clarity the significance of this platform and what it represented. When you’re building a splash, it’s one of those ideas that you have in the back of your head. You have to be really judicious and selective with when you use those ideas. You can’t be doing it every day or people will stop taking you seriously. We felt like this was a moment that required it.

Back To Front

HuffPost has been many things over the years. A link page and blog. A new-media trailblazer and Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom. As its cofounders stepped away one by one — the last remaining, Huffington, departed in 2016 — the website that once helped reinvent America’s relationship to the news was increasingly something else as well: the last of a dying breed.

Pitney: I guess the unfortunate thing is social media and to a certain extent Google, the increasing extent to which they use platforms to find the news, hurt everyone’s homepages. Fewer people are going to individual media sites.

Smith: It became conventional wisdom that the homepage was dead. And when Huffington first stopped linking out, we lost signal. Those of us who used to get links and say, “Holy shit, there are a lot of people reading.” I think when the homepage stopped linking out, a lot of us lose track of how big that homepage still was, how influential HuffPost still was and how many people were still reading it. Because we used to get this very direct signal — you get linked on the homepage and be like, “Holy shit, after Drudge this is the biggest pool of news junkies on the internet.” Which I think it actually remained in a way that I didn’t realize for a while.

Banks: A lot of my time at HuffPost, especially when I took over the front page team, was, “We’re still here, we’re still doing our thing.” But the idea was, “Homepage traffic is in secular decline. Social is what we’re going to put a lot of attention into. And you’re just kind of gonna be there.” And then that changed at a certain point. It swung back around.

Smith: I think the homepage that we all wrote off turned out to be kind of a saving grace, right? And having a slightly older audience that was locked in, rather than shopping for the next thing. We know those two, which I think we saw as vulnerabilities, turned out to be the great strength, the kind of stickiness.

* * *

Sekoff: Kenny had this thing, which I love, that he said. He said, “20 years ago, it took 20 years to build a brand. 10 years ago, it took 10 years. Five years ago, it took five. We think we could do it in a year.” And he was right. It actually took us about six months to create a brand that meant something. Really meant something.

Lerer: Arianna and I — we’re best friends. We talked 50 times a day, would go back and forth and it would be boom, boom, boom, boom, very quickly. We make decisions and then we implement the decisions. A lot of the success of The Huffington Post was the combination of Arianna getting the blogs, getting tens of thousands of people to write blogs, and then I did the news. And they just worked hand in hand. We would talk constantly, all the time. We were like one person, the two of us.

Huffington: From the beginning, we knew the internet had transformed not just how people consumed information but how quickly they moved on if something didn’t grab them instantly. That’s what made the splash so essential. It was a digital front page, but instead of trying to cram everything above the fold (which doesn’t even exist online), we made a bold choice: highlight one big story and do it in a fun, eye-catching way, and often with a wink.

Zaleski: I’m really nostalgic for that time now because it was such a wonderful group of people and community. It was very stressful, and it was all-consuming. No way in hell would I have been able to do it with my current life, with children and having a life, but it was worth it.

Shea: It’s hard to remember browsing habits, but this was a destination site from its early days, and there are very few destination sites left. People would type the URL or bookmark it. We really saw it — people would come in the morning, there’d be spikes around lunchtime. You would have people coming to the site to see what the top story was, and to see what our take on it was. And sometimes you would see our framing become the framing, in the same way that people used to call Drudge the assignment editor of media.

Peretti: I think having people come directly, having a brand that stands for something, being an authority that can share what the news is, but also help you understand how to feel about it and what to think about it — all of that is really valuable, and it’s been a through line, a habit in people’s day for so many years, for decades, visiting and glancing the splash. It orients them in the world in a way that you can’t get many places.

Sekoff: We didn’t know we were making history. We didn’t know we were making something that was going to become the iconic internet news brand, you know? We were just trying to fucking stay alive, you know? There were moments where I went, “This might work.” “This could be something.” But, you know, there was no part [of me] that went, “This is going to be the thing that I’m going to spend the next 12 years working on,” or “This is going to define my career.” “This will be, for me, the headline in any obituary, if someone writes one.” You don’t think like that.