AOL, Inc. : Huffington Hits App Store Newsstand

Glossy, Sophisticated, Informed and Full of Attitude. Charts New Territory for Magazine Apps and The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post Media Group (HPMG), a leading source of news, opinion, entertainment, community and digital information, announces today the launch of Huffington, a new, weekly magazine app for a slower, more in-depth Huffington Post experience. Huffington hits the App Store Newsstand today and incorporates Huffington Post's unmatched live commenting and other social engagement tools to allow for greater reader participation in richly detailed and probing narratives -- while also showcasing HuffPost's brand of Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writing. Huffington's elegant design takes full advantage of the iPad's signature Retina display, offering our audience a crisp reading experience, vibrant photography, and stunning graphics.

"I'm delighted to introduce you to our new iPad magazine," said Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group. "At HuffPost, we now have nearly 500 editors and reporters who produce between 70 and 80 original reported stories each day. Our team is constantly crafting an array of narrative jewels, and Huffington is our way of putting the very best of them in the perfect setting. By inviting readers to savor those stories away from the hustle and bustle and random searching that too often characterize our online lives, it's our hope that Huffington will not only preserve but enhance the reading experience in our hyper-connected world."

Each week, Huffington will lead off with a primer on the news of the week, enticing Q&As, powerful photo essays, sophisticated data visualizations, top-tier commentary, and notable quotes from the HuffPost community. Long-form journalism anchors the core of the magazine, with carefully-crafted features exploring a broad range of topics including politics, business, entertainment, technology, foreign affairs, the environment, sports, religion, and relationships. Pulitzer-Prize winner David Wood, along with writers such as Peter S. Goodman, Thomas Zeller Jr., Howard Fineman, Michael Calderone, Bianca Bosker, Michael Hogan, Saki Knafo, Trymaine Lee, Ryan Grim, Sam Stein, Lynne Peeples, and many others from the HuffPost staff will contribute their unique storytelling to Huffington. The magazine's closing section will be devoted to an array of reviews built around culture and the zeitgeist, including television, film, music, lifestyle, and, of course, the Greatest Person of the Week.

"We are building upon the best traditions of weekend magazines - their beauty, depth and intelligence - and marrying that to HuffPost's signature brand of attitude, iconoclasm, passionate engagement and community," said Timothy L. O'Brien, Huffington Post's Executive Editor. "We plan to take The Huffington Post and magazines to a new place by extending our weekday relationship with readers to the weekend, when they have more time to simply relax and absorb a visually stunning and intellectually challenging experience on their iPads."

The premiere issue of Huffington showcases Peter S. Goodman's analysis of Barack Obama's perilously strained relationship with young voters and its impact on the 2012 presidential election, Michael Hogan's profile of the challenges facing independent filmmakers navigating the financial and creative hurdles of Hollywood, and Tom Zeller's poignant and troubling exploration of the impact of toxic dumping on a small Alabama town.

Huffington offers unprecedented opportunities for engagement on a magazine app, bringing to tablets the full array of HuffPost's unmatched community tools for the first time. Research shows that tablet users spend the longest period of time reading news on a daily basis, while news apps in the App Store consistently drive the most engagement. [1]

Advertising traction is already excellent for Huffington. Toyota is the sole launch partner of Huffington. Attracted by a difficult-to-reach target demographic, Toyota ultimately chose to sponsor the inaugural issue of Huffington because of the target audience's inclination to not only share what it's reading via social media (40%), but to actually talk about content they had recently read on a tablet (85%).

"Toyota is committed to being an innovator in the marketing space, providing customers with exciting content and enhancing the user experience through strategic media partnerships," said Dionne Colvin, National Marketing Media Manager for Toyota. "With more people from a highly sophisticated, engaged audience turning to tablets for news consumption, partnering with The Huffington Post on this new publication was an easy decision for us."

Huffington is a weekly publication. A one-month trial of Huffington is complimentary, with subsequent downloads priced at 99 cents per issue, $1.99 per month or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

About The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is a Pulitzer Prize-winning source of breaking news, features, and entertainment, as well as a highly engaged community for opinion and conversation. The Huffington Post has 36.9 million monthly unique visitors (comScore April, 2012) posting over 6.5 million comments each month. The site has over 30,000 bloggers -- from politicians, students and celebrities to academics, parents and policy experts -- who contribute in real-time on the subjects they are most passionate about. The Huffington Post has editions in the UK, Canada, Quebec, France, and Spain, with L'Huffington Post Italia scheduled to launch this year.

[1] http://www.localytics.com/blog/2011/games-news-apps-top-ipad-user-engagement-categories/

The Huffington Post
Rhoades Alderson, 917-232-1973
rhoades.alderson@huffingtonpost.com

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