Female Hero of the week: Arianna Huffington

Female Hero Arianna Huffington

Our Female Hero of the Week is Arianna Huffington, blogger, opinionmaker, socialite and speaker at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Ms Huffington can be credited with single-handedly moving the image of the blogger away from the somewhat geeky man blogging from his living room, to the influential opinion maker, be it male or female, with a glamourous edge.

Arianna got interested the blogosphere in 2002, when bloggers proved their power in taking down Trent Lott for racist remarks.

Since then her website, the Huffington Post, started in 2005, has been branded one of the most successful political blogs in the US. The 4m unique users a month are testimony of just that.

But her success has probably as much to do with her insight into politics as it has to do with her colourful personality. Arianna was born Arianna Stassinopoulus, her father being an- occasionally- struggling newspaper publisher who may have passed the journalism gene to his daughter. Her mother was a multi-lingual devotee of an Indian guru. She studied in Cambridge, England, writing her first of eleven books, the Female Woman, at 22. A retort against the women’s liberation movement, in it she put forward the idea that women’s emancipation which insists on equal status and equal opportunity for distinctly female roles is to be supported, whereas liberation forces women into male roles, devalues femininity and is therefore not to be pursued.

Since then she has moved from being anti-liberation, and pro-Republican, partly springing from her involvement in her former Huffington husband’s Senate bid in 1994, to a more liberal view on politics, campaigning against Bush’s policy in Iraq. She is also an interesting critical factor in the US mediascape, having spoken out against the US mainstream media’s for deceiving the American public on the decision to go to war in Iraq.

One of the busiest people in the blogosphere, Arianna’s work is well-rewarded, with rumours circulating that her website could raise around $200 million dollar. It will be interesting to find out from her at the Web Expo how she intends to make the site profitable, something it is not consistently at this point. For if she is not an Internet Hero, we don’t know who is.