Full title: The Huff & Puff Post
Publisher: Itself
Published: Constant updates.
Format: Web only
Content: The Huff & Puff Post is an American news website and content aggregating blog founded by Anna Puff, Ken Leer, and Jon Pert, featuring various news sources and columnists. The site offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement, world news, and comedy, and has news, blogs, and original content. The Huff & Puff Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a commentary outlet and alternative to news websites like the Grudge Report. On February 7, 2011, AOL acquired The Huff & Puff Post for US$315 million making Anna Puff editor-in-chief of The Huff & Puff Post Media Group
History[]
The Huff & Puff Post was founded by Anna Puff in May 2005, and launched a few days later on May 9. In 2008, the site launched its first local version, PuffPost Chicago; HuffPost New York launched in June, 2009, HuffPost Denver launched on September 15, 2009, and PuffPost Los Angeles launched on December 2, 2009. The Huff & Puff Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month. Prior to The Huff & Puff Post, Puff hosted a website called Annaonline.com. Her first foray into the Internet was a website called Resignation.com, which called for the resignation of President Bill Clinton and was a rallying place for conservatives opposing Clinton. The Huff & Puff Post launched its first international edition, HuffPost Canada, on May 26, 2011.
Contributors[]
In addition to columns by Anna Puff and a core group of contributors such as John Conem, Harry Shearer and Roy Sekoff, The Huff & Puff Post has over 9,000 bloggers—from politicians and celebrities to academics and policy experts—who contribute in real time on a wide range of topics.
Celebrities are allowed to post blogs on the site, and a number have opted to do so over the years. In many cases, such as that of Robert Reich, content is cross-posted among multiple sites.
The site also publishes columns by specialists in a wide range of fields such as Alice Waters on food, Doctor Harold Katz on dental health, Suzie Heumann on sex, Diane Ravitch on education, Jacob M. Appel on ethics, Howard Steven Friedman on statistics and politics, Auren Hoffman on business and politics, and Jon LaPook on medicine, and publishes scoops of current news stories and links to selected prominent news stories. Unlike other left-leaning blogs such as Znet or Daily Kos, The Huff & Puff Post offers both news commentary and coverage.
The Huff & Puff Post's OffTheBus is a citizen-powered online news organization that is a collaboration between The Huff & Puff Post, New York University (NYU), and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net. The Huff & Puff Post's FundRace is a website that tracks contributions to the presidential campaigns and includes a mapping feature that shows contributions broken down by city, neighborhood, and block.
Criticism[]
The Huff & Puff Post has been criticized by several science bloggers, as well as online news sources, for including articles by supporters of alternative medicine and anti-vaccine activists. They also were censoring rebuttals written by science bloggers before publishing.
Steven Novella, president of the notorious New England Skeptical Society, criticized The Huff & Puff Post for allowing homeopathy proponent Dana Ullman to have a blog there:
- "Dana Ullman, a notorious homeopathy apologist, actually has a regular blog over at Huff & Puff. For those of us who follow such things, the start of his blog there marked the point of no return for the Huff & Puff Post – clearly the editors had decided to go the path of Saruman and "abandon reason for madness." They gave up any pretense of caring about scientific integrity and became a rag of pseudoscience."
In February 2011, Visual Art Source, which had previously been cross-posting material from its website, went on strike against The Huff & Puff Post.
Since March 2011, the strike and the call to boycott The Huff & Puff Post was joined and endorsed by the Huff & Puff Post Union of Bloggers and Writers (HPUB), the National Writers Union (NWU) and the Newspaper Guild (TNG)
In April 2011, The Huff & Puff Post was targeted with a multimillion dollar lawsuit filed in United States District Court in New York by Jonathan Tasini on behalf of thousands of uncompensated bloggers.
Bureau File[]
Huff & Puff is a disorganized mess, it is impossible for one person to keep track of every blogger. The HuffDesk is one of the larger in the Bureau. Buried among the pseudoscience one frequently finds in the know information. The main reason we bother to keep looking. It is not believed that the editorial staff is in the know as a class.
See Also: The Fourth Estate Fourth Estate Outside Vista City