Carla Buzasi on the launch of The Huffington Post UK

This week, The Huffington Post, launched in the UK amidst one of the biggest media stories of the year: that of the phone hacking scandal and closure of The News of the World. Its blog posts, aggregated content and headlines have talked of little else since. But what are the goals of The Huffington Post UK? How will it differ from its American counterpart? And, as a subsidiary of AOL, has the independent, free-spirited and challenging nature, which made the original site such a success, been watered down? We caught up with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief of AOL Europe and The Huffington Post UK to find out more.

The British and American markets are very different… Having said that, the DNA of The Huffington Post, with its community platform, great bloggers and journalists and fast response to news, isn't changing from one side of the Atlantic to the other - what made the site a success is in the US will be what makes it successful here.

The demographic we've got the site at the moment is… 20s to early 30s, which is fantastic, but I can see that expanding to include people that are a bit older as well - ones that have traditionally gone to The Telegraph or The Times Online. I think they will still go to those places, but we will be the place that they come to know where all those stories are breaking.

This week, The Guardian broke the phone hacking story and we link directly to them… They've done the research and the investigation and absolutely our readers should read it there, but we're providing a live blog, tweets, the latest from Prime Ministers Question Time and so on.

There are already 1.2 million people in the UK… that read the US version of The Huffington Post, so it's about making sure that we deliver what they expect. For the AOL editorial on our other site (MyDaily), women are a definite focus, but for The Huffington Post, we're sure that equal numbers of men and women are going to be interested in the content.

We are not left, right or centre… Our USP is that we should be presenting the whole range of opinions. If David Cameron, Ed Milliband or Nick Clegg want to blog for us, they can and a few of them have done this week. It's more about presenting every side of the story. It's not about going up against a particular newspaper, it's about being really, really broad in our offering.

High profile bloggers are attracted to The Huffington Post… because of its tremendous reach. They also get to put across their opinions in their way without being grilled by Jeremy Paxman. This is their chance to eloquently explain what they want to and also respond to other people.

It's great being part of AOL... we've got an infrastructure already in place and that meant we could launch in the UK very quickly. It doesn't mean that we've got a figurehead or family behind the site that has an axe to grind. Arianna Huffington knows exactly what she wants for The Huffington Post - she's got a very clear vision for it - and I don't think anything will change that.

The news that The News of the World was closing… absolutely blind-sided me. I was in a meeting when the email came through and couldn't have predicted it.

I feel very sorry for the many hard-working journalists at that paper... who are casualties of this and have nothing to do with the phone-hacking. I expect that lots of them will be re-hired to work on The Sunday Sun and that The Sunday Sun will become The News of the World in everything but name. It's very interesting to watch.

Rebekah Brooks is in a very, very difficult position… I think that if you're an editor, you know that the buck stops with you. At the same time, you cannot be aware of every little thing that is going on with every member of staff and every little story. It's just not possible, especially when a paper is that big.

The fact that she hasn't gone yet would suggest... that she's not going. Overall, I think journalists are going to have to become more accountable.

This week has been a baptism of fire… We all thought that this was going to be a soft launch. There aren't normally any big political stories going on at this time of year and the intention was that it would ramp up in September. That hasn't been the case and we've had to hit the ground running, but it's tested us all and because of that, we've had something to get our teeth into and really test what we're made of.

We will never start charging for content… That's not what we're in the business of doing. The idea is that people can access our content wherever they are, at whatever time of day, iPad, phone, lap top, so know we've got no plans for that.

Emily Jenkinson

8th July 2011