How has HuffPo managed to leap so far ahead of almost everyone else in its space? The deep pockets help. But another key is how quickly The Huffington Post embraces new technologies. The lifeblood of a big Web site is what’s called a “content-management system,” meaning a bunch of software programs that handle how stories get published. HuffPo has one of the best and most advanced systems on the Internet, and it’s constantly evolving. The site has 30 techies strung around the globe, in the United States, Ukraine, India, Chile, the Philippines, and Vietnam—“so we have developers working 24/7,” says Hippeau. That publishing system enables HuffPo’s editors to create new ways to tell stories, mixing links and videos and slide shows and comments, grabbing bits and pieces from other sources and sprinkling on some topspin from HuffPo’s writers, all while measuring traffic to see what’s working and what’s not.

While some HuffPo reporters do the old-fashioned work of going out and interviewing people, the job for a lot of HuffPo editorial staffers involves sitting at long tables in a big room in New York grabbing sexy stuff from other Web sites—photos of Leonardo DiCaprio shirtless, a video of a baseball player getting hit in the groin. Editors watch Google to see which search terms are hot at any moment, then craft stories that will show up in response to those searches. The stories might be written by a HuffPo staffer, or might be grabbed from some other site, or might be a mix of both. (About 40 percent of what HuffPo runs is stuff that originated somewhere else.) The trick is to design stories in such a way that they will get pushed toward the top of search rankings—a black art known as “search-engine optimization,” and an area in which HuffPo excels.

Huffington acknowledges the importance of technology, but insists “there’s no way you can supersede human editing.” She’s proud of HuffPo’s original journalism, and her explanation for the site’s success is that from the start it went after news with a passion and a point of view—there was no pretending to be neutral or unbiased. “We have a clear attitude. On the Afghan war, for example, we’ve been clear that we believe it’s an unnecessary war,” Huffington says. “The whole thing is about editors following their passions.”