In the last 12 months, The Huffington Post has introduced new content areas such as entertainment and business and plan on adding international news, sports and books in an attempt to become an all-purpose Internet newspaper. This summer, The HuffPo will take it one step further by introducing a metropolitan section, local versions for major cities.

The plan will be expensive and set The HuffPo into competition with not only existing newspapers, but arguably, with companies like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN.com as well.

Many of their posts receive less than 10,000 views, and the site has a high "bounce rate," meaning users visit one page then leave the site. But the site's topical focuses resulted in 2.9 million unique visitors in January and 3.7 million in February, according to Nielsen Online. More than half the traffic comes from non-political pages.

Micah L. Sifry, Editor of the blog TechPresident.com isn't confident in HuffPo's movement toward covering a larger variety of news. "Success on the Web is defined by spotting niches and serving them well. Will people go to The Huffington Post for great sports blogging? They're certainly not going to go see what Arianna says about opening day," he said.

Huffington and her colleagues reject comparisons to news sites, saying HuffPo seeks to be a community with a distinct attitude, not merely a collection of links.

"Look at Yahoo or Google or CNN. Take away the branding and just look at the headlines, and they're very similar," said Roy Sekoff, the site's editor. "But if you take away the branding of The Huffington Post and the signage, you'd probably still recognize us."

In response to speculation that she'll sell the website after the election, Huffington said, "It's not something we've discussed."

Source: The New York Times through I Want Media