The complete origins story of the Huffington Post. How Arianna Huffington, Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti first connected, and how they turned the company into a media empire, and now Pulitzer winner: 

In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. ‘I loved being a gatherer,’ Huffington would later say. ‘I don’t really think you can make gathering mistakes.’

Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. ‘Arianna,’ he says, ‘can make weak ties into strong ties.’

“Six Degrees of Aggregation.” — Michael Shapiro, Columbia Journalism Review

See also: “BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?”