Celebrity charisma
Arianna Huffington acknowledges her debt to Houston, talks titles, Trojan horsesand telling stories
Arianna Huffington speaks in Houston.Photo by David Schmoll
Huffington was frank in the question and answer session with Randall Morton.
Houston is of course, the town of Michael Huffington, Arianna's friendly exhusband.
Arianna Huffington is best known as the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the news website that takes her name, but Houston oil heir and Arianna's ex-husband Michael Huffington deserves at least some of the credit for the wildly successful publication's title. There's no Huffington Post without Michael Huffington.
Arianna took the stage with the Progressive Forum at the Wortham Center's Cullen Theater to expound on her latest publication, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream Wednesday night in Houston — Michael Huffington's town — which she immediately acknowledged.
"All of my great friends and family are here tonight," Huffington joyfully proclaimed at her podium. "And of course, Houston gave me the name 'Huffington.' Can you imagine the Huffington Post being called the Stassinopoulos Post? It would not have been doing so well, let's be honest," she added with her charming humor.
In the course of her address, Huffington eschewed reading from her book, instead talking articulately about the key concepts and the first-hand accounts of middle-class families impacted by the recession. Ever the intellectual, the Cambridge-educated editor made reference to Greek mythology in describing the book's "jarring" title:
Ever since I was a child growing up in Greece, I was fascinated with Cassandra — that figure of mythology in the Trojan War that warned the Trojans not to let in the Trojan Horse, that it was full of Greeks. And they ignored her. The Trojans ended up very wrong and very dead. I've always felt that when there's still time to prevent everything from happening, you need to sound what you see from the rooftops. And to me, the trajectory we're on is a very dangerous trajectory ... The reason I chose this very jarring phrase is because we still have a window during which we can do everything we can to prevent becoming a Third World country."
Huffington's appearance represents the first installment of the fall season of the Houston-based Progressive Forum, which professes to be the only civic speaker organization in America dedicated expressly to progressive values.
In his introduction, the organization's president, Randall Morton, admitted, "I'm feeling a little awestruck by Arianna coming. I sense here is a star. And we've had a lot of speakers here, so I have to ask myself, 'Are there really stars in the celebrity sense?' I now feel, yes, there are authentic celebrities, those with a sort of natural sparkle and a kind of clarity to their charisma. Arianna's got it."
Huffington refers to her two daughters with Michael Huffington as "half-Houstonian, half-Greek." She originally married the energy business alumnus in 1986, divorcing in 1997 after he announced that he is bisexual.
Michael Huffington remains in Houston, residing at River Oaks' Huntingdon highrise and producing films such as Bi the Way, a documentary about bisexuality in America which premiered at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival, and We're All Angels, a 2007 documentary about gay Christian pop singers Jason and deMarco. He is also the producer of Father vs. Son, a comedy which premiered at WorldFest 2010 and won the Houston Film Critics Society Award for "Best World Premiere - Feature Films."
"Just like marriage, divorce isn't easy either, and ours has been no exception," Arianna describes in a particularly confessional blog entry, "But even though we no longer had a marriage to keep us together, we had something even more powerful — our daughters. And, spurred by our mutual devotion to them, we have made a huge effort to work through all the difficulties and be friends."
On what would have been their 20th wedding anniversary, Michael sent 20 yellow roses to Arianna's home with a card stating, "Happy 20th Anniversary. We'll always be the parents of two remarkable young women. Love, Michael."
On her website, Huffington documented a 2009 vacation to Crete with her ex-husband and two daughters, arriving at the conclusion, "We have gotten to the point where there is really nothing left to work out — and it feels completely natural to be able to sit on a beautiful beach or stroll through the lovely streets of Agios Nikolaos together."
With both daughters now enrolled at Yale, Huffington recently moved from her Brentwood, Calif. home to New York in order to be closer to her company's SoHo offices. Indeed, Huffington has been singled out as the winner of the digital media revolution, with HuffPo now turning a profit and valued at over $100 million.
In a post-address question and answer session with Morton, the web empress revealed the underpinnings of her unprecedented success. Describing the time leading up to the website's launch, she recalled, "Even my friends said, that's a ridiculous risk to take at my 'advanced age.' They would say things like, 'Arianna, the Internet is a young person's game.' "
Yet with her savvy advertising-based platform, HuffPo has capitalized on its "very educated" demographic and expanded into 22 sections that embrace "high-brow" political coverage and "low-brow" entertainment gossip.
When asked by Morton about the fate of "the heroic journalism of big city daily newspapers, which are getting thinner all the time, as is the case with the great Houston Chronicle," Huffington professed her love for paper news, yet added, "At the same time, in order to appeal to a young population, they need to have a thriving online site. And the way to think about online is not as, 'Oh whatever is not good enough for the newspaper, we'll put online.'
"Online has a different DNA," she said. "The key is you've got to engage with your readers."
HuffPo receives about three and a half million comments a month, for which Huffington has enlisted a sizeable army of moderators to filter. "Because the whole point is to have a civil discussion," she reiterated.
In terms of the future of journalism, Huffington remarked, "Our job of telling stories — I think we've lost that. Telling stories is the way to capture peoples' imagination. We have to touch their hearts and their minds, and the way to do that is through storytelling. Journalists must do that — especially when times are scary."
