The Huffington Post, also called HuffPo or HuffPost,  Huffington Post, The [Credit: Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.] Huffington Post, The [Credit: Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.] American news and commentary Web site, with offices in Los Angeles and New York City. The Huffington Post was founded in May 2005 by political activist Arianna Huffington, former America Online executive Kenneth Lerer, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab graduate Jonah Peretti. It was created to provide a liberal counterpart to the Drudge Report, a conservative news and commentary Web site. The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising.

The Huffington Post features blogs from more than 1,600 unpaid bloggers drawn from the worlds of politics, entertainment, and academia. Celebrities and politicians who regularly contributed to The Huffington Post include John Cusack, Deepak Chopra, Nora Ephron, Bill Moyers, Bill Richardson, and John Kerry. Huffington serves as editor in chief of The Huffington Post and is herself a frequent blogger on the site.

Besides featuring celebrity blog posts, The Huffington Post also provides news updates and hyperlinks to news sources and columnists. The site has content-sharing partnerships with TMZ.com, People, Rolling Stone, Variety, and Yahoo! In mid-2007 The Huffington Post expanded its coverage to include business and entertainment news. Later that year The Huffington Post launched the comedy news site 23/6 in partnership with InterActive Corporation (IAC). In 2008 special news sections were added to The Huffington Post for the U.S. presidential election: Off The Bus offered news from the campaign trail, and Fundrace allowed users to track celebrity donations to political candidates.

In March 2011 AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million. As part of the deal, The Huffington Post Media Group was created, with Arianna Huffington as its president and editor in chief. The new venture included all of AOL’s media properties and The Huffington Post. That same year The Huffington Post expanded beyond the United States by launching editions in Canada and the United Kingdom. A French edition was launched in 2012. Later that year the U.S. version of The Huffington Post was awarded its first Pulitzer Prize (for national reporting by David Wood).