Queens of the blog age

Toby Young

19 February 2011

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Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown, the great social networkers

What’s the right analogy to describe the parallel careers of Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown? The hare and the tortoise? All About Eve? Alien vs Predator? Nothing quite works, not least because the race isn’t over. But there’s little doubt that with the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, Arianna has momentarily eclipsed Tina Brown as Queen of All Media. Arianna is said to have pocketed $100 million. I don’t envy the person standing next to Tina when she heard that.

The career paths of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (b. 1950) and Christina Hambley Brown (b. 1953) are remarkably similar. Both come from relatively modest backgrounds — Arianna’s father was a peripatetic Greek journalist, while Tina’s was a producer of minor British war films — and both had mothers with frustrated ambitions. Arianna applied to Cambridge after seeing a picture of the university in a magazine, and became the first foreign-born president of the Cambridge Union. Tina went to Oxford where, besides interviewing the great and the good for Isis, she wrote a prize-winning play that enjoyed a brief run at the Bush theatre.

After graduating and moving to London, they both hitched their wagons to fortysomething journalists: Bernard Levin in Arianna’s case and Harold Evans in Tina’s. While Arianna made a name for herself as a panellist on Any Questions and Call My Bluff, Tina became the editor of Tatler and attracted the attention of S.I. Newhouse Jr., the billionaire owner of Condé Nast. Tina became briefly mesmerised by the cult of the aristocracy and published a book called Life As A Party, documenting her adventures in stately homes. Arianna became a member of the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) in which she was ordained as a minister. (She remains one to this day and is licensed to perform weddings in California.)

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