Queens of the blog age

What’s the right analogy to describe the parallel careers of Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown? The hare and the tortoise? All About Eve? Alien vs Predator? Nothing quite works, not least because the race isn’t over. But there’s little doubt that with the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, Arianna has momentarily eclipsed Tina Brown as Queen of All Media. Arianna is said to have pocketed $100 million. I don’t envy the person standing next to Tina when she heard that.

The career paths of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (b. 1950) and Christina Hambley Brown (b. 1953) are remarkably similar. Both come from relatively modest backgrounds — Arianna’s father was a peripatetic Greek journalist, while Tina’s was a producer of minor British war films — and both had mothers with frustrated ambitions. Arianna applied to Cambridge after seeing a picture of the university in a magazine, and became the first foreign-born president of the Cambridge Union.