The AOL-owned Huffington Post’s UK edition has gone live and Irish bloggers have been invited to participate. The Huffington Post, the most linked-to blog on the internet, has 9,000 bloggers including presidents, academics, celebs and policy makers.
A spokesman for The Huffington Post said Irish bloggers would be welcome to contribute. “Bloggers can e-mail HuffPostUK@Huffingtonpost.com to pitch an idea for a blog post to the HuffPost Blog Team,” he said.
Based in Dublin, Aengus McClean, head of AOL Global Operations Limited, said: “Much of The Huffington Post UK content will be of interest to Irish readers and the opinions and thoughts of the Irish will be represented with a number of celebrities and well-known bloggers already lined up to blog for the new edition.
“We will have Irish perspectives on topics ranging from music to food, and we’ll be delighted to welcome more Irish bloggers as contributors to The Huffington Post UK edition in the coming months.”
The Huffington Post (US) already attracts a monthly audience in excess of 1.2m UK-based readers who are engaged, influential and affluent. The UK site will feature premium ad formats, including the recently launched ‘Project Devil’, which has generated unprecedented engagement levels, time spent on ads and time spent viewing ad videos.
At launch, The Huffington Post UK will showcase an LG Project Devil campaign brokered through leading media agency Mindshare and a Dell PLE campaign negotiated by Mediacom.
Digital water cooler
The Huffington Post (US) is the most linked-to blog on the internet, according to Technorati. HuffPost ‘Social News’ launched in 2009 to leverage the power of social networking to allow readers to create their own personalised social networking-like news page on the site. HuffPost‘s bloggers contribute on a wide range of topics making news today.
Among those who have blogged on HuffPost are Barack Obama, Larry David, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Neil Young, Roger Martin, Mia Farrow, Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Jeff Rubin, Jamie Lee Curtis, Alec Baldwin, Mike Nichols, Craig and Marc Kielburger, Al Franken, Aaron Sorkin, Diane Francis, Natalie Portman, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, Russell Simmons, George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, and more. Recent additions for HuffPost Canada include Sarah Richardson, Elizabeth May and David Suzuki.
Some well-known Irish figures who will be blogging include Diarmuid Gavin, gardener and television presenter; David McWilliams, economist and journalist; Conrad Gallagher, chef; Paul Noonan, singer with Bell X1; Dr Nina Byrnes, GP and medical affairs TV presenter; Elaine Crowley, TV3 Midday Show presenter; Lisa Cannon, TV3 Xposé presenter; Paul Byrne, movie critic, Movies.ie; comedians Paddy Courtney and Carol Tobin; Mary Kate Geraghty, singer with Fight like Apes; and Peter McGuire, food blogger, Cheapeats.ie.
“We are arriving here in the midst of a rich and thriving media culture marked by great innovation,” Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of AOL Huffington Post Media Group said.
“We look forward to adding HuffPost UK to the mix, and to our real-time ‘digital water cooler’ – which embraces the best of the new (immediacy, transparency, interactivity) and the best of the old (fact-checking, accuracy, fairness and an emphasis on storytelling) – becoming the spark for many interesting conversations.”
