AOL’s The Huffington Post Media Group has appointed co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone as strategic adviser for social impact to enhance innovation around social impact and cause-based initiatives. Veteran journalist John Montorio has joined as culture and entertainment editor, with an additional ten new hires coming aboard Huffington Post Media Group’s reporting team. Howard Fineman is named editorial director of The Huffington Post Media Group. Also, in partnership with Newark Mayor Cory Booker Patch.com, the hyper-local news and information platform, expands to two new neighbourhoods in the city. AOL has also announced a ‘30-Day Service Challenge’ to encourage employees to volunteer, with all sections of The Huffington Post prominently featuring the work of individuals and nonprofits helping the needy. Stone will advise on social impact and cause-based initiatives, develop a platform to facilitate people doing service in their communities, rally other companies to invest in and deploy corporate practices, and create and develop a video series spotlighting companies and executives at the forefront of philanthropy and corporate responsibility. Montorio served as a managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and as an associate managing editor of The New York Times. At both papers he was responsible for features coverage. During his seven years at the Los Angeles Times, he helped to overhaul the Calendar sections, the Book Review, the Sunday Magazine, Travel, Food, Home, and Health and launched Outdoors, and Image, a fashion and style section. He also was responsible for a variety of special news projects, including the development of more profiles in the main news sections and improved coverage of trends. Before joining the LA Times in 2001, he spent fifteen years at The New York Times, where he relaunched many of the paper's signature feature sections, including House & Home, Dining In/Dining Out and Sunday Styles, and launched The City section for metro and The Living Arts in the national editions.
The Huffington Post Media Group's reporting team is also expanding to include an additional ten new hires. Jennifer Bendery has been named as white house correspondent, Caroline Dworin has been named culture/style reporter, Dave Jamieson has been named workplace reporter, Saki Knafo has been named general assignment writer, Simone Landon has been named news editor and Catherine New as real estate editor. Bendery has been covering the White House as well as the House and Senate Leadership for Roll Call for three years. She reported for four years on the Texas State Legislature for GalleryWatch in Austin, Texas, and covered health care policy for a number of national weekly newsletters. Dworin was a regular contributor to the city section of The New York Times, and appeared in the anthology ‘More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times.’ She has written for The New Yorker's ‘Book Bench’ blog, for Newsweek.com and for the Columbia Journalism Review. Jamieson comes from the DC news site TBD.com, where he covered transportation issues. Before that he authored a non-fiction book, Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, and wrote Slate, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Outside, and the Washington City Paper. Knafo has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the Believer, GQ, and Publishers Weekly. His work has appeared in two anthologies, ‘Lost and Found: Stories from New York (Mr. Beller's Neighborhood)’ and ‘New York Stories: Best of the City Section.’ Landon was a producer of Morning Edition for Rhode Island Public Radio. She covered immigrant workers for Labor Notes magazine and daily news for Detroit Public Radio. At The Detroit Metro Times, she wrote on arts and music as well as urban education.New has nearly ten years of editorial and newsroom experience, with her writing and graphics having been published by the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Metro Newspaper, Flavorpill.com, Men's Vogue and Psychology Today. In 2004, she was on the team that launched Metro Newspaper in New York City, oversaw the development of the features sections and authored the weekly real estate column, ‘At Home With...’
In addition, as Politics Daily is being folded into The Huffington Post Media Group, Andrea Stone, Alex Wagner and David Wood are joining as senior national correspondent, social impact reporter and military defense correspondent, respectively. Stone was senior washington correspondent at AOL News. Before joining AOL in September 2009, she spent nearly 24 years at USA Today. A veteran national correspondent, Stone has covered politics, Congress, the military, foreign affairs and all manner of general news. Wagner was most recently white house correspondent for Politics Daily. She was previously editor-in-chief of Fader Magazine, and is a frequent contributor to MSNBC. Wood has 30 years of experience covering conflict and has filed dispatches from dozens of battlefields. He has served as correspondent for Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service and the Baltimore Sun. In addition, Howard Fineman has been named to the larger role of editorial director of The Huffington Post Media Group. Fineman, a longtime political correspondent, had previously served as senior political editor of The Huffington Post. In this new role, Fineman will help shape The Huffington Post Media Group's overall coverage, and work to integrate AOL news and information brands. He will also guide The Huffington Post's upcoming presidential campaign coverage. Howard Fineman will continue to report for The Huffington Post, and will continue his role as an analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
Following an intensive coordinated effort by both HuffPost and AOL tech teams after the close of the merger, The Huffington Post and AOL sites go live with the first phase of user feature integration. AOL.com will highlight a ‘Most Popular Articles’ widget, with the most popular articles and blog posts from HuffPost and AOL; similarly, HuffPost's ‘Most Popular’ widget will feature articles from AOL.com and HuffPost. The Huffington Post will be Devil-enabled, and a Project Devil ad will be seen on the site. In addition, HuffPost will feature hyper-local content from Patch. As part of "30-Day Service Challenge", employees of The Huffington Post Media Group and AOL will be helping throughout their local communities, from preparing food for families and individuals in need at the LA Food Bank to dancing with elderly residents of nursing homes in New York City, a volunteering opportunity offered by New York Cares, New York City's volunteer organisation and AOL's New York partner for the initiative. The 30-Day Service Challenge is a lead-up to AOL's ‘Monster Help Day’ on 20 May, the company's second annual employee-wide focused day of service. Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong will be teaching a class to New York City school children at Urban Academy of Arts and Letters in Brooklyn, as part of a Citizen Schools programme encouraging professionals to team up with public schools to create an enhanced learning community after the school day ends. AOL will also be donating USD 50,000 to Citizen Schools to help the organisation expand its efforts in providing productive after-school activities for middle-school children in underserved communities.
