BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Arianna Huffington and Tim O'Brien on HuffPost's Pulitzer Win

This article is more than 10 years old.

Arianna Huffington. (Image credit: Getty Images for AOL via @daylife)

Can traffic-chasing sensationalism and society-changing journalism co-exist under the same roof? The decision by the Pulitzer Committee to award this year's prize for national reporting to the Huffington Post's David Wood for his series on wounded veterans is a pretty good sign that they can, at least for now. Editor in chief Arianna Huffington and executive editor Tim O'Brien took a few minutes out from the staff's champagne toast to talk about what it means for the seven-year-old news organization and where it's headed from here.

FORBES: What's the mood like over there today?

Tim O'Brien: It was electrifying. People in the newsroom were ecstatic. It was gratifying a recognition of David's hard work, and of a yearlong commitment to a deeply personal story that we put a lot of editing and reporting resources against. And it's an affirmation that this kind of work can thrive on the web.

FORBES: The Pulitzer judges often reward work that produced real-world results -- new legislation or regulations, etc. Did you see any of that from this series?

TO: I think the Veterans Administration has engaged more deeply around the issue of medical care for returning veterans.

Arianna Huffington: It's hard to find an exact correlation, to say what caused something, but there’s no question that returning veterans and what happens to them are much more part of the national conversation, and we hope David’s stories contributed to it. Even The New York Times story on Sunday about suicides among military veterans -- these are major facts and stories that need to be part of the national conversation. We cannot prove any direct correlation between these stories and the additional coverage we’re seeing and we wouldn’t claim that, but it’s exciting to see a lot more coverage.

FORBES: Did you submit anything besides David Wood's series for consideration?

AH: We also submitted work by Chris Kirkham. He's a young reporter who’s done a great series on for-profit colleges, which has had a real impact on how for-profit colleges are seen. It's a very, very deserving series. But as we were telling Chris when we made the announcement today, he's 28. David is 66. Chris has plenty of time to win his own Pulitzer. He has four decades to catch up.

FORBES: How popular were the stories in this series with readers? Did they drive much traffic? Did you do them because  you thought people would read them or because they were important?

TO: Both. We’re selecting the stories because we think they're important but we found a very engaged readership for them. We've seen enormous page views around some of our best feature work. We know it's valuable enough that we've decided to launch a weekly magazine app to highlight it.

AH: Ever since we launched HuffPost we've wanted to use narrative and storytelling to put flesh and blood on data and statistics. It's not something we're going to abandon.

FORBES: Tell us more about the weekly magazine . [Readers: We broke news that it was in the works last month.]

TO: We're launching on April 24. The idea is to put beautiful design and beautiful photographs around our long-form work, which sometimes you can miss on the site in the course of the day with all the new stories and videos and commenting there.

FORBES: Will it be free or will you charge for it?

AH: It will be free to start with, and we’re looking at whether to charge after people have sampled it, after a trial period.

TO: We’re thinking that through, but we do think it’s something we can possibly monetize, and it’s something our audience may feel is worth paying for.

FORBES: Totally unrelated question, but there's been some reorganization going on at AOL and I'm wondering if Patch is still part of the Huffington Post Media Group.

AH: We are looking at how everything is going to be treated now that HuffPost is becoming more of an independent unit, with technology and marketing reporting into HuffPost. We haven't really made any official decisions yet.