More than a year after Huffington Post co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington stepped down from her position, the staff at the HuffPost website is preparing to go on a seven-week, 23-city bus tour to “Listen to America” as part of an attempt to enhance its “new, less-partisan image.”
Lydia Polgreen, a former editor with the New York Times and the current editor-in-chief of the site, announced on Thursday, July 13, that the purpose of the tour is to learn about people in America by traveling across the country this autumn.
As part of a post entitled “Listen to America,” Polgreen stated:
We want to know: What does it mean to be American today? To find out, we’re hitting the road this fall to interview people about their hopes, dreams, fears and definition of "being American."
By converting a tour bus into a mobile video studio, we’ll capture conversations with people of all ages and backgrounds. Our goal: moving, multimedia storytelling that showcases what we share as Americans, rather than what divides us.
The editor-in-chief called the tour “a hugely ambitious, cross-country project” being undertaken because: “For journalists, listening is more important than ever” because “trust in media has bottomed out.”
“We want to address that head-on and build trust in the work we do,” Polgreen noted. “We’ll listen to what’s most important to them and help tell those stories to the vast HuffPost audience.”
“Second, political divisions between us seem starker than ever,” she asserted.
“But at HuffPost, we believe there’s still so much that unites us as citizens,” Polgreen continued. “As we visit 23 states, we’ll use our bus -- built out as a mobile video studio -- to listen and collect hundreds if not thousands of voices, and we’ll share many of them along the way.”
“And by working on the ground with community leaders, nonprofits, educational institutions, local businesses and others, we’ll make sure people know we’re there to listen,” she noted.
“Third, as journalists, being good listeners and getting out of our own way are at the core of our practice,” the editor-in-chief noted. "Listen to America" is “an opportunity to practice this skill over and over, and discover great stories out in the field, where they live.”
“We’re popping our own bubbles in more ways than one,” she noted. “Join us! The bus hits the road on Sept. 12 in St. Louis. Check our map to see if we’re coming to your town. And shoot us any tips or thoughts at listening@huffpost.com. We’re here.”
Meanwhile, Hadas Gold -- a media and politics reporter at the Politico website -- noted in an article on Thursday:
Having made its name as a home for liberals and the blog posts of coastal elites, the recently renamed HuffPost is seeking to reinforce its new, less-partisan image with a seven-week bus tour through Middle America to “listen and learn what it means to be American today.”
Starting in September, a traveling party of rotating HuffPost staff members ... will visit more than 20 cities, eschewing the coasts for the likes of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Oxford, Mississippi, and Odessa, Texas.
“At each city,” Gold stated, “the site will host events, roll out planned stories with local media outlets, send out reporters to write about the communities and collect stories from residents 'in their own words.'”
“It’s a unique project for a media organization that made its name as the crusading home for progressives,” she continued, “even attaching a note to each story during the election about then-candidate Donald Trump calling him a ‘xenophobe,’ ‘racist’ and ‘misogynist.’”
By the way, the tag was removed on Election Day, Gold stated.
Founder Arianna Huffington created The Huffington Post in 2004 to be a liberal version of the Drudge Report.
However, Gold noted, “Huffington left her namesake site last year to found a new health-and-wellness start-up, leaving the renamed HuffPost in the hands of Polgreen … and Chief Executive Jared Grusd, who are reshaping the site’s identity.”
“This would be identity defining for HuffPost,” said Polgreen in an interview. “We are in a moment for [determining] our own identity and the role we play in the overall news ecosystem and what the next iteration of that looks like.”
“And this felt like a great way to go out and … report out the story of who we should be in the world,” she noted.
It will be fascinating to see if this tour from Arizona to Pennsylvania actually produces a more even-handed HuffPost or if it’s just cover for continuing the wildly liberal slant the site has maintained since it was founded in 2004.
Of course, if they’d been listening to Americans before, they wouldn’t need to have a bus tour, would they?
