It was a job application ("this was an amazing opportunity potentially at the right place at the right time, and I wasn't going to let it pass"), and a month later, Buzasi met Huffington in the Charlotte Street hotel. Aiming to talk the Greek-born, British-educated internet mogul into launching a UK version of the HuffPo site, Buzasi turned up with her iPad.
On it was a mocked-up version of what it would look like, put together on her own initiative, which, it seems, was precisely what Huffington wanted to see. So Huffington insisted on bringing Buzasi along to a meeting at the offices of the Guardian, where she was due to address journalists together with Armstrong, Buzasi's boss, who had staked his reputation on buying the news and politics site.
"She announced halfway through the meeting that we're launching a HuffPo website in the UK, much to the surprise of Tim Armstrong" – which is one way to get a job. Later that day, the iPad mock-up had been printed out, and Huffington was holding it up at an industry conference, presumably because bouncing Armstrong in front of Guardian journalists was not enough. Fifteen weeks later, last July, Huffington Post UK launched, during which time Buzasi also managed to get married, spending her honeymoon "with my BlackBerry strapped to my ear and my iPad melting in my lap", such was her dedication to the project. She has barely taken a day off since; the Friday before we met was apparently the first in a year, she says in an unguarded moment.
In its way, the Huffington Post aspires to be a digital newspaper. Romney Shambles blares the front page at the time of writing, with a characteristic full-width picture lead. A year after launch the UK site employs 25 journalists, although in truth the culture is more magazine meets newspapers meets social media. Much of the news is Press Association copy, or written up in a similar style, but it would be a mistake to dismiss a growing operation. When it was launched Huffington Post UK employed eight journalists, and while most of the staff are young, and not well-known, the latest recruit is Mehdi Hasan, the political journalist taken from the New Statesman because "Arianna and I agreed we should focus on politics". What news has HuffPo UK broken? She says the site was the first to highlight the use of inappropriate Hotmail emails for correspondence by officials at Michael Gove's education department "weeks before the FT wrote about it".
However for the moment, at the heart of the Huffington Post in the US and in Britain are its unpaid bloggers – Buzasi counts 3,800 writers who pen for the UK site, although David Beckham may not have written the blog with his byline entitled: "Make Children the Real Winners of London 2012."
Anyway, on using free labour, Buzasi is unrepentant. "We don't pay the bloggers," she acknowledges. "It's been talked about a lot already – we don't commission people to write. The site is a platform, people use it in the same way they use Twitter or Facebook but they have longer to write and no deadlines." The bloggers are the Huffington Post's unique feature, and they are read and lightly edited by a team of three before publication, but without explicit commisssioning one has to hope that somebody will produce something relevant for the front page of a news-driven site. Mind you, the bloggers don't seem to mind, between 60 and 100 a day are produced and "that's just in the UK", Buzasi observes.
With the typical evangelism of a digital media executive, Buzasi says she is targeting "her younger brother's generation" who "never buy newspapers, who don't have a connection with a brand". Although the site's founder once ran unsuccessfully to be governor of California, the Huffington Post "doesn't especially have an ideology" and the site is – in a somewhat familiar formulation – "beyond left and right". Is that not dull? No, she says, and argues that it's not hard to get politicians, or their aides, to pen columns – "we can get every party represented".
If that sounds obvious, more interesting is a new format, "change your mind", where readers are asked a yes/no political question before being shown two blogs covering either side of an argument. With opinions absorbed, readers are invited to vote again. A recent example asks: "Is Iran A Nuclear Threat To The West?" with Paul Flynn MP saying no and Toby Greene, who works for the pro-Israel lobby group Bicom, saying yes. Press all the buttons and it turns out that Flynn changed the minds of 3% of readers. Later I ask what HuffPo stands for and Buzasi offers "debate and opinion"; a new digital ad campaign will feature the phrase "the conversations start here".
However, news is what drives traffic at HuffPo, she says, and then, predictably enough, celebrity; technology and entertainment do well, but perhaps not sport. "We have one person on sport," she notes, although this didn't stop the site live-blogging every match in Euro 2012. Comedy is featured on the nav bar – which amounts to a collection of YouTube videos, including one of a horse and a dog walking down the pavement unaccompanied by humanity, and Buzasi believes there is scope for tighter integration of comedy and news.
So is the formula working? "We had 1.2 million UK visitors visiting Huffington Post sites at the time of launch, now we have 3.5 million. They consume 15 pages per user and the time spent on our site is up 400%." Global monthly visitors to HuffPo UK in this year's first half amount to between 4.4 million and 5.3 million; for comparison the Telegraph is 15.9 million, the Sun, 10.3 million, the Independent 7.2 million.
She says the site is "on track" financially; Visit Iceland and Jaguar are among its advertisers, and revenue growth has roughly matched the growth in editorial staff, from eight to 25. AOL's overall UK operation has about 43 editorial staff, also working on two other sites, My Daily, for women, and Parent Dish, whose target audience is in the name, and there are various commercial staff to take staff numbers to about 100. Firm figures are hard to glean, but AOL's international display revenues were $10.9m in the third quarter of 2011, when the site launched, and were $13.1m in the second quarter of 2012 – numbers that include Canada as well as the UK.
"It's a lean operation," she says, which will "grow as you can; you don't add extra staff until you can pay", which isn't always the approach adopted by new media startups. Internally, the atmosphere is more of a quieter magazine operation, and Buzasi's own background is almost exclusively in digital publishing, having come up through Condé Nast's "seventh floor" digital division, working on the likes of vogue.com, before moving to IPC to run Marie Claire's website. The move to AOL came in August 2010, when there was no HuffPo, just a collection of obscure branded websites, most of which have joined great URLs in the sky. Of those that are left, Huffington Post is easily the best known.
The eponymous founder speaks to Buzasi "once a week" in a scheduled call that also involves Nicholas Sabloff, the world editor, but otherwise New York seems to be fairly hands-off. "Positive" is how she describes her boss, the president and editor-in-chief, although there had been persistent rumours in New York that Huffington and Armstrong were at loggerheads (AOL's shareholders have been restive about the deal), and that the socialite-turned-journalist was trying to raise funds to buy the site back. Whether the UK editor would be the first to know is debatable, but Buzasi says: "I don't think she wants to leave, she's the figurehead of this site." We shall see.
Buzasi, meanwhile, carefully tries to position her site against the backdrop of Fleet Street. She says she is prepared to sign up to a revamped Press Complaints Commission, although she accepts that was "a statement from us that we want to be taken seriously as a news organisation". She professes to like the reforms proposed by Lords Hunt and Black, although she has "reservations about cost" because "we are a small organisation" – and wants digital-only brands to have a say in its governance, rather than be squeezed out by the old Fleet Street elite. But she feels that the Leveson inquiry has been "going on for what feels like for ever" and that it would be better to encourage people to set up their own websites.
"I hope we will be paving the way for other sites – let's make the British scene more interesting. Leveson showed that politicians are in the pockets of a few newspaper proprietors." That doesn't mean that she wants to play the print-is-dead card, preferring to argue that the challenge for newspapers is their legacy. But she does believe the news environment has changed fundamentally. "On the web, more people are moving around brands, that makes you question your beliefs," which is presumably where she hopes HuffPo, blog-heavy and keen to change your mind, can fit in.
The Week That Was: Who Wears the Trousers?
Headline news this week: in relationships where men do more housework, couples tend to have less sex.
That was the groundbreaking insight from experts at the University of Washington, and later published in the American Sociological Review.
Having spent three years nursing large volumes of Shakespeare (and the odd hangover) around my university, coming out at the end with essentially a degree in reading, it's always interesting to read what spurious statistics come out of the 'serious' part of college campuses.
Turns out, if I'd been hanging around with the maths crowd or in the science labs rather than in the humanities building, I too could pass judgment on ironing ratios versus bedroom activities.
Still, hand it to the men (it was men, right?) in white coats; their latest insight has certainly got people talking. From Time magazine to the Daily Mail, male columnists crowed with glee on the pages of their papers, while their female counterparts were altogether less pleased.
Just when we thought traditional gender roles were fading out of fashion, to be viewed in the future with some kind of retro nostalgia, we seem to be doing our best to backtrack on all the giant leaps forward, albeit with data that contradicts numerous previous studies.
If you want to interrogate the actual numbers (presuming you're not too busy mopping the floor, or alternatively perfecting your karma sutra positions), what it boiled down to, was men who performed no 'stereotypical female tasks' had sex with their other-halves approximately 1.6 times more often per month than couples where the husbands were responsible for all those girly tasks. (And, no, I can't bring myself to type what I'm supposed to view as a stereotypical female task, but take it from me, the list didn't include chopping logs or washing the car).
Enough with the facts and figures. As Time.com points out in a similar article from last year, where it was found that men in female-centric professions do more 'guy' chores at home (don't you hate it, that there's still such a thing as a female- or male-centric profession?), essentially "humans don't always make sense." Possibly the most sensible thing that's been written on the whole topic.
While America makes its case for traditional values in the home, back in the UK, David Cameron will be hoping his party, embrace some forward-thinking attitudes this week as MPs vote on gay marriage.
Having firmly placed himself as pro legalisation for same-sex marriages, Cameron risks losing face should the bill not be passed.
More worrying for the PM, the issue is being used by those against gay marriage to bring his leadership into question. According to a survey commissioned by the Coalition for Marriage - notable anti-gay-marriage campaigners - one in five Tory supporters would not vote Conservative in the next general election if the coalition government legalises same-sex marriage.
Wake-up call for Cameron, or seriously skewed data, this week looks set to be as uncomfortable for the Tory leader as all the previous ones so far this year.
Let's hope SamCam has some nice relaxing ironing saved up for him at home.
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