I think we need to reckon in a very serious way with the emotional content of news and the way that people perceive facts and their perception of their situation and to me I think the tabloid is like fundamentally an emotional form of journalism and that kind of emotional valence is what distinguishes it from the broad sheet.
Lydia PolgreenThe New York Times I think really is the gold standard of a certain type of journalism and in some ways it's the most important type of journalism, this chronicle of the biggest and most important stories of our time covered with a level of rigor and seriousness that is really unparalleled.
Lydia PolgreenTo me the tabloid sensibility, in the best sense of the word, and I think people as like tabloids have receded as a kind of force in media people have started to associate the word "tabloid" with like National Enquirer and stuff like that.
Lydia PolgreenTo me, that's the foundational fact of my identity is that I'm a journalist and so it's hard to imagine putting anything else first.
Lydia PolgreenWe've traditionally thought of media on this traditional left/right spectrum and most media's kind of clustered in the center and I think people have traditionally thought of HuffPost as being this kind of liberal, progressive voice and that's, you know I think they're are good reasons for thinking that. I mean it started after George W. Bush was reelected and was an answer to the Drudge Report.
Lydia PolgreenI think all of us in the pursuit of more perfect version of the truth and the story need to reckon with what we bring to the story, and I think that I'm confronting that in a very real way everyday. I'm extremely proud of who I am and it's nice to see it celebrated, but if someone were to ask me to list in order the biography, you know journalist comes first.
Lydia PolgreenFor us what we're trying to do is find the right balance of creating a space for emotion that leads to a sense of empathy and solidarity rather than a sense of division. In my most grandiose moments I think of HuffPost as a platform that makes solidarity possible, that really thinking about the emotional content of stories is a way to help people who think, or who have been manipulated to think, that they're interests are opposed to one another, that they actually are aligned in a fundamental way and they're actually in the same boat.
Lydia Polgreen