The Huffington Post

Founded	May 2005
Founder(s)	Arianna Huffington Kenneth Lerer Jonah Peretti Andrew Breitbart
Headquarters	New York City, United States
Key people	Arianna Huffington (editor-in-chief) Tim Armstrong (CEO) Roy Sekoff (editor) Anne Sinclair (French edition editor-in-chief)
Employees	200+
Parent	AOL
Slogan	"The Internet Newspaper: News, Blogs, Video, Community"
Website	http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Alexa rank	94 (June 2012[update])[1]
Type of site	News and blogging
Registration	Optional
Available in	English, French, Spanish
Launched	May 9, 2005
Current status	Active

The Huffington Post is a liberal or leftist American news website, content aggregator, and blog—founded as an alternative to existing conservative online media outlets such as the Drudge Report—by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, the late Andrew Breitbart,^[2][3] and Jonah Peretti, featuring various leftist columnists and various news sources.^[4] The site offers news, blogs, and original content, and covers politics, business, entertainment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy living, women's interest, and local news.

The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a liberal/left commentary outlet and alternative to conservative news aggregators such as the Drudge Report.^[5][6][7][8] On February 7, 2011, AOL acquired the mass market^[9] Huffington Post for US$315 million, making Arianna Huffington editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group.^[10][11] In 2012, The Huffington Post was the first commercially run, United States digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize.^[12]

History[link]

The Huffington Post was founded by Arianna Huffington in May 2005, and launched a few days later on May 9. The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month. Prior to The Huffington Post, Huffington hosted a website called Ariannaonline.com. Her first foray into the Internet was a website called Resignation.com, which called for the resignation of President Bill Clinton and was a rallying place for conservatives opposing Clinton.^[13][14][15]

Local and international editions[link]

In 2008, the site launched its first local version, HuffPost Chicago;^[16] HuffPost New York^[17] launched in June, 2009, HuffPost Denver^[18] launched on September 15, 2009,^[19] HuffPost Los Angeles^[20] launched on December 2, 2009,^[21] and HuffPost San Francisco, launched on July 12, 2011.^[22] HuffPost Detroit,^[23] launched on November 17, 2011.^[24] The most recent, HuffPost Miami, launched in November 2011.^[25]

The Huffington Post launched its first international edition, HuffPost Canada,^[26] on May 26, 2011.^[27] On the 6 July 2011 the Huffington Post UK^[28] launched its UK edition.^[29] On October 10, 2011, Huffington announced a deal with Le Monde and Les Nouvelles Editions Indépendantes for a French language, France-targeted edition, Le Huffington Post,^[30][31] to be launched by the end of 2011. On February 8, 2012, another French language edition was launched in the Canadian province of Quebec.^[32] International editions for Spain, Italy and Germany have been announced for 2012.^[33]

On May 1, 2012, a US-based Spanish language edition launched under the name HuffPost Voces^[34], replacing AOL's Hispanic news platform, AOL Latino.

Contributors[link]

In addition to columns by Arianna Huffington and a core group of contributors such as John Conyers, Harry Shearer, Jeff Pollack, and Roy Sekoff, The Huffington Post has over 9,000 bloggers—from politicians and celebrities to academics and policy experts—who contribute on a wide range of topics.

Celebrities are allowed to post blogs on the site, and a number have opted to do so over the years. In many cases, such as that of Robert Reich, former Secretary of the Treasury, content is cross-posted among multiple sites.^[35]

The site also publishes columns by specialists in a wide range of fields such as Anand Reddi^[36] on global health issues, Alice Waters on food, Harold Katz on dental health, Suzie Heumann on sex, Diane Ravitch on education, Jacob M. Appel on ethics, Howard Steven Friedman on statistics and politics, Auren Hoffman on business and politics, Jon LaPook on medicine, Cara Santa Maria on science, and Iris Krasnow on marriage. It publishes scoops of current news stories and links to selected prominent news stories.

The Huffington Post's OffTheBus is a citizen-powered online news organization that is a collaboration between The Huffington Post, New York University (NYU), and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net.^[37][38] The Huffington Post's FundRace is a website that tracks contributions to the presidential campaigns and includes a mapping feature that shows contributions broken down by city, neighborhood, and block.^[39]

UK bloggers include Alan McGee, Jody Thompson, Dom Joly, Dina Rickman, Malcolm Cowley, Alex Lee Thomson, Anna Hart, Martin Moore, Colin Pattison, Belinda Parmar, Rachel Preece and Labrinth.

Investment[link]

In August 2006, The Huffington Post announced that SoftBank Capital would invest $5 million in the site, which had grown in popularity in only a year, to help expand it.^[40] Plans included hiring more staff to update the site 24 hours a day, hiring in-house reporters, and a multimedia team to do video reports. Alan Patricof's Greycroft Partners also invested. The news marked the site's "first round of venture capital funding."^[41]

The site now has invested in video blogging, with many of the site contributors contributing via video, and capturing clips in the media and posting them on the site.

In November 2008, The Huffington Post completed $15 million fundraising from investors, to finance expansion including more journalism and the provision of local news across the United States.^[42]

On February 7, 2011, AOL announced it would acquire The Huffington Post for US$315 million. As part of the deal Arianna Huffington became president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, including The Huffington Post and existing AOL properties Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino (now HuffPost Voces), AutoBlog, Patch, and StyleList.^[11]

Controversies[link]

Allegations of supporting pseudo-science[link]

The Huffington Post has been criticized by several science bloggers, as well as online news sources, for including articles by supporters of alternative medicine and anti-vaccine activists and censoring rebuttals written by science bloggers before publishing.^{[43][44][45][46]}

Steven Novella, president of the New England Skeptical Society, criticized The Huffington Post for allowing homeopathy proponent Dana Ullman to have a blog there:

"Dana Ullman, a notorious homeopathy apologist, actually has a regular blog over at HuffPo. For those of us who follow such things, the start of his blog there marked the point of no return for the Huffington Post – clearly the editors had decided to go the path of Saruman [a villain in the Lord of the Rings, a well-known book] and 'abandon reason for madness.' They gave up any pretense of caring about scientific integrity and became a rag of pseudoscience."^[47]

Labor disputes[link]

In February 2011, Visual Art Source, which had previously been cross-posting material from its website, went on strike against The Huffington Post.^[48]

Since March 2011, the strike and the call to boycott The Huffington Post was joined and endorsed by the Huffington Post Union of Bloggers and Writers (HPUB), the National Writers Union (NWU) and the Newspaper Guild (TNG) ^[49]

In April 2011, The Huffington Post was targeted with a multimillion dollar lawsuit filed in United States District Court in New York by Jonathan Tasini on behalf of thousands of uncompensated bloggers.^[50] The suit was dismissed with prejudice on March 30, 2012 by the court, holding that the bloggers had volunteered their services, their compensation being publication.^[51]

Misogyny[link]

When criticizing Mitt Romney for the lack of women and minorities on Romney's team at Bain Capital, Huffington Post referenced Ted Kennedy^[52], a man who was a womanizer and had an affair with Mary Jo Kopechne and left her to die in his car.

Political views[link]

Although Arianna Huffington has stated that her paper is "not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news," representatives of the Republican Party have indicated that they believe The Huffington Post's headline writers, bloggers, and commentators are hostile to their views and tend to negatively spin articles, and especially headlines, about Republican Party candidates. According to Michael Steel, press secretary for Republican Party House leader John Boehner, Republican aides "engage with liberal websites like The Huffington Post [anyway, if for] no other reason than [because] they drive a lot of cable coverage."^[53] Jon Bekken, journalism professor at Suffolk University, has cited the The Huffington Post as an example of an "advocacy newspaper."^[54]

Awards[link]

• In 2012, The Huffington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for senior military correspondent David Wood's 10-part series about wounded veterans, Beyond the Battlefield.^[55][56]
• The Huffington Post is 2010 People's Voice Winner in the 14th Webby Awards^[57] and is the Winner in Lead411's New York City Hot 125.^[58] The Huffington Post lost the 2010 Webby Award jury prize for Best Political Blog to Truthdig.^[59]
• The Huffington Post was named second among the 25 Best Blogs of 2009 by Time.^[60]
• The Huffington Post won the 2006 and 2007 Webby Awards for Best Politics Blog.
• Huffington Post contributor Bennet Kelley was awarded the Los Angeles Press Club's 2007 Southern California Journalism Award for Online Commentary^[61] for political commentary published on the site.^[62]
• The Huffington Post is ranked the most powerful blog in the world by The Observer.^[63]
• The Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington was named in 2009 as number 12 in Forbes' first ever list of the Most Influential Women In Media.^[64] The same year, she was ranked as number 42 in the Guardian's Top 100 in Media List.^[65]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• The Huffington Post on Twitter
• The Huffington Post collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• The Huffington Post collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• All the Aggregation That's Fit to Aggregate, Bill Keller, "The New York Times Magazine", 10 March 2011
• Nieman Journalism Lab. "The Huffington Post". Encyclo: an encyclopedia of the future of news. http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/huffington-post/. Retrieved 1 April 2012. 

Roy Sekoff is the founding editor of The Huffington Post. He was born and raised in Miami.^[1][2]

Before helping launch The Huffington Post, he was a writer, producer, and on-air correspondent for Michael Moore’s Emmy-winning TV Nation. Sekoff served as the head writer for the 2000 Shadow Conventions, and as Communications Director for Arianna Huffington’s 2003 gubernatorial campaign.

He has also worked as a screenwriter -- penning scripts for 20th Century Fox, Universal, Disney, Caravan, and Sony -- and as a free-lance journalist, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Times, Elle, Redbook, and Rock Magazine.

Sekoff is a frequent guest on TV and radio shows, and has appeared on The Ed Show, The Joy Behar Show, Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor, Entertainment Tonight, and Anderson Cooper/360, among others.

In 2010, he was one of the Executive Producers of Freshmen, a pilot for ABC created by Greg Malins.

In college (at the University of Miami) he was voted "Funniest Man on Campus". He starred in a "B" movie Animal-House-type comedy "King Frat" filmed in Miami and Coral Gables. Sekoff is also a frequent guest on the morning news series, "In Natan Cohen". He discuses his views and talks on modern-day economics.

References[link]

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Tara Leann Stiles (born May 6, 1981)^[1] is an American model turned yoga instructor and founder of Strala Yoga in New York City. She starred in Yoga For, the first instructional on-line yoga video series, produced by Ford Models. Vanity Fair reported on a yoga video that Stiles specifically designed for Sarah Palin; the Vanity Fair reporter commented that "Tara Stiles has got to be the coolest yoga instructor ever."^[2] Stiles is also the personal yoga instructor to Deepak Chopra, with whom she collaborated to create Authentic Yoga for the iPhone.

Early life[link]

Stiles grew up outside Morris, Illinois. Her mother designed, without any professional experience, their passive solar home and built it together with her father, now retired from a career in nuclear power.^[3] She has one sibling, an elder brother, Chad, who is an electrician.

Modeling career[link]

After graduation she studied dance in Chicago, where one of her ballet instructors introduced her to yoga. A local photographer brought her to Marie Anderson Boyd, founder of Aria Models in Chicago, later acquired by Ford Models, who signed her on the spot. Boyd booked Stiles' first casting, an ad campaign for Coca-Cola, and She moved to New York City soon after.^[3] She eventually realized that modeling was not what she was truly interested in. When Ford asked her to start making short promotional yoga videos for the agency and post them to YouTube, it was the beginning of her current career. She took a 200-hour course to become a certified instructor, and continues to make the videos, which have drawn over four million views.^[3]

Stiles was one of the first yoga instructors to use social media to attract students. The YouTube videos led a DVD with fellow model Brooklyn Decker as well as one of her own, Yoga Anywhere: The New York Session. After leaving Ford and modeling in 2007, she blogged for Women's Health and The Huffington Post (HuffPo).

A 2009 post at HuffPo entitled "Help! I'm Addicted to FaceBook",^[4] has received 1.2 million hits, making it one of the most-viewed blogs on the site.^[3] Stiles's first book, Slim Calm Sexy, published by Rodale, rose to the #1 spot on Amazon.com and best-selling status the first week it was released, August 31, 2010.

Stiles has been featured in pictorials for W, Shape Magazine, Self, Marie Claire, Fitness, and appeared on the covers of City, Time Out, and Fit Yoga. Stiles appeared in ads for Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Target Corporation, Gap and American Apparel, as well as numerous TV commercials for the Chrysler PT Cruiser and Avon. Stiles' health and yoga related work has been featured in such magazines as Esquire, Mens Health, Ascent, and Yoga Journal.

Stiles has been the Face of Women's Health, a Rodale, Inc. publication, since April 2009. Stiles is also a spokesperson for Nissan Motors,^[5] along with Ryan Hall and Lance Armstrong.

Strala Yoga[link]

In 2008 Stiles met her husband, Michael Taylor, at the Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York.^[6] "He was normal, he's straight, he does yoga ... I'm done for", she joked. After a civil ceremony in New York, they honeymooned in Negril, Jamaica.^[3][7]

The couple founded the New York City yoga studio Strala^[8] later that year. They made up the name, which is Swedish for "radiates light". In addition to continuing to make her videos and other media appearances, she currently teaches a quarter of the classes and oversees 13 other instructors at the 3,500 square feet (330 m²) studio, which has become profitable enough for her to consider opening a branch. Deepak Chopra and Jane Fonda are among her students; the former considers her his personal instructor. "I have been doing yoga for 30 years," he says. "I have had teachers of all kinds. Taking lessons from her has been more useful to me than taking yoga from anyone else."^[3]

Stiles does not follow any school of yoga or instructor and focuses purely on its physical aspects and health benefits, with no philosophical or spiritual dimension. She eschews the Sanskrit names for yoga positions and does not ask students to chant. She hires instructors without regard to the certification process normally required elsewhere, preferring to assess them by watching them teach, although Strala does offer a teacher-training program. Strala's per-class fee, $10, is lower than other Manhattan yoga studios.^[3]

Her goal is to make yoga more accessible. "People need yoga, not another religious leader. Quite often in New York, they want to be religious leaders, and it's not useful", she explains. "I was never invited to the party anyway—so I started my own party". Too many people outside yoga, she believes, see it as "something Jennifer Aniston does". Fonda has praised "her ability to make yoga accessible to people who might be scared of it or think it might be too esoteric". Stiles says she receives letters regularly from people, such as military men, who do her videos but are afraid to go to a yoga studio. "This studio is the first place I have felt comfortable", one Strala student told The New York Times. "It doesn't feel like it's all 26-year-old former dancers."^[3]

Stiles' approach to yoga has met with some controversy in the yoga community. Jennilyn Carson of the popular YogaDork blog reports that some practitioners consider it "disrespect to what the practice is" for Stiles to promote it as a weight-loss method. "I don't care what Tara Stiles says yoga is," another yogini says. "It's not about making your body beautiful." Yoga traditionalists have also complained about her willingness to draw on her modeling background and exploit sex appeal in yoga-wear advertisements and her videos, some of which she has appeared in wearing short shorts and a tank top.^[3] "Who made these rules?", Stiles has responded. "I feel like I'm standing up for yoga." To critics of her videos and photo shoots, she says, "We should not be hiding behind our bodies. [They] should be empowering."^[3]

Television[link]

Stiles was a contestant and winner of MTV's Fear episode 9, "Fort Gains". She has also appeared in Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle: Cremester 3. She co-hosted three segments on ^[9] on fitness and fashion with Pedro Andrade, Siafa Lewis, and Margherita Missoni.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Tara Stiles at the Internet Movie Database
• Tara Stiles at the Fashion Model Directory
• Tara Stiles on iTunes
• YouTube
• Tara Stiles
• Tara Stiles on Twitter
• Tara Stiles Video Interview on TDL Profiles

Rick Genest
Rick Genest in Nicola Formichetti's pop-up shop, Tribeca, September 17, 2011
Born	(1985-08-07) August 7, 1985 (age 26) Châteauguay, Quebec, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Field	body art, body modification fashion modelling, film acting
Website	rickgenest.com

Rick Genest (born August 7, 1985) is a Canadian artist and fashion model born in Montreal. He is also known as Zombie Boy for being tattooed like a corpse across the majority of his body.^[1]

Early life[link]

Genest grew up in Châteauguay, a suburb of Montreal. As a child, Rick developed a brain tumor which was surgically removed when he was 15 years old.^[2][3] According to his mother he waited, out of respect for her and his father, until the age of 16 to get his first tattoo.^[1] He then left home at 17 after graduating from high school, but it was not until the age of 21 that he would first come to Montreal tattoo artist Frank Lewis, since then responsible for inking the majority of the designs on his body, which they create together.^[1] This has taken over six years, Genest spending thousands of dollars on the artwork, conceived by him to be "about the human body as a decomposing corpse – the art of a rotting cadaver.", and "also a tribute to horror movies", a favourite genre of his.^[1]

Rise to fame[link]

He played a background role in Cirque du freak: the Vampires assistant as one of the freaks in 2009.

On March 5, 2010, a Facebook fan page was created about Genest's unusual choice of tattoos. This page reached 1,526,292 members (as of November 19, 2011) and ultimately led to his discovery by Lady Gaga's Fashion Director Nicola Formichetti.^[4]

On January 19, 2011, Rick was featured in the new MUGLER Autumn/Winter mens collection, headlining the collection on the brand's website, after his discovery by Creative Director Nicola Formichetti.^[5][6][7][8] It was Genest's discovery by Formichetti and then Gaga's urging which actually resulted in the menswear show, something not originally planned.^[9] His discovery also influenced Formichetti on the collection itself.^[9] The show was accompanied by a video featuring Genest shot by fashion photographer Mariano Vivanco.^[6] He later featured alongside Lady Gaga in the fashion show for the women's 2011 Autumn/Winter line.^[10]

On February 27, 2011, Genest was featured in Lady Gaga's video for "Born This Way", with Lady Gaga wearing makeup to replicate Genest's tattoos.^[11]

Genest can be seen styled in MUGLER by Formichetti and shot by Mariano Vivanco in the sixth volume of Vogue Hommes Japan, the editorial being titled "Hard To Be Passive".^[12][13] In the Spring/Summer issue of GQ Style (UK), Formichetti and he are interviewed, with Genest shot in MUGLER by Karim Sadli for the editorial.^[14]

In late 2011, Genest became part of a campaign entitled "Go Beyond the Cover", promoting Dermablend professional makeup products, appearing in a video where a makeup team covered all the tattoos on his head, torso, arms, and part of his back in its concealer product, with the cover-up process video documentation played in reverse to show the concealer's effectiveness.^[15]

Genest also played in a music video of the Polish pop singer Honey. The video for her the song "Sabotage" was published on 19 Jan 2012.

References[link]

Notes

In the 2009 made for TV movie "Carny", starring Lou Diamond Philips as a small town sheriff, Rick was seen as a Tattooed Man in a Carnival. No credits were given to him for his appearance. Source: IMDB (since edited-3/2/12)

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rick Genest

• Official Website