When Arianna Huffington announced plans two-and-a-half years ago to publish a blog, she was greeted with derision by many of her friends.
The archetypal blogger, after all, was supposed to be a solitary outsider who worked from home railing against the arrogance and excesses of the so-called mainstream media.

Ms Huffington, on the other hand, was a multi-millionaire author with many well-connected friends.
In spite of that frosty reception, the Huffington Post has emerged as the fifth most popular blog on the web (according to the internet tracker Technorati) and the blog claims to attract 3.5 million unique users a month.
Ms Huffington and her partners tend to recoil slightly when the Huffington Post is called a blog, since it has now become an online newspaper that has also added, on its website, new sections focusing on entertainment, media and business in an attempt to lure more readers and advertisers.
It counts 43 full-time employees but the most dramatic and revealing news is the fact that it has recently hired a handful of well-known journalists to do old-fashioned reporting!

At this point it is interesting to notice how vary the scenario can be: some blogs are moving to the mainstream while in the meantime traditional news companies are making a determined effort to become more “new media”.