Although faced with widespread skepticism and attacked by conservatives as a lame attempt at creating buzz for Arianna Huffington’s personal causes, the Huffington Post celebrity blog was
launched a year ago this week, and it has managed during that time to achieve a certain amount of legitimacy. (Full disclosure: I was among Huffington's original cadre of featured
bloggers.) USA Today pauses to take stock, quoting Huffington as well as others on the site's first-year achievements (and embarrassments, of which there have been a few).
"We are living in a 500-channel universe," the site's founder tells the newspaper. "There is so much happening, and it is so easy for even front-page stories to die. What we provide is
staying on a story, developing it until it does break through the static." Tony Blankley, a columnist at the Washington Times, says of Huffington, "My sense is she has managed
to make a presence through a combination of the site itself, enhanced by having her big personality, a formula that she has shown to be effective in every niche of the media she has ventured into. Her
personality is a force multiplier for whatever substantive activity she's taking on."
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