All interviews will take place in Starbucks.
Via Politico:
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,” the site will announce on Thursday.
Starting in September, a traveling party of rotating HuffPost staff members led by editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen will visit more than 20 cities, eschewing the coasts for the likes of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Oxford, Mississippi and Odessa, Texas. At each city, 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, even attaching a note to each story during the election about then-candidate Donald Trump calling him a “xenophobe,” “racist” and “misogynist.” (The tag was removed on Election Day.) Founder Arianna Huffington created The Huffington Post in 2004 to be a liberal version of the Drudge Report.
But 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, formerly of The New York Times, 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.”
Though many of the cities the group is visiting voted for Hillary Clinton in last year’s election, all but two of the states went to Trump. But Polgreen says they’re not visiting “Trump country,” pointing to a reason for each city or state on the tour like an interesting community college system in Fort Wayne or Detroit’s large Arab-American population. Hillary Frey, HuffPost’s director of editorial strategy who came up with the bus tour idea, also pointed out that logistically it didn’t make sense to go to the corners of the country where the distance from one city to the next would be too far.
“We were basically looking at a pretty eclectic mix of communities that represent a lot of different facets of American life,” Polgreen said. “All of these ideological divisions [in the media] are confusing right now and for me it’s less about left or right — it’s who are you more oriented toward, more oriented to the interest of the wealthy and powerful or are you orientated toward the people who are not in the top 20 percent.”