By NYU Staff

Katharine Zaleski

NEW YORK — News is Katharine Zaleski’s life. In the winter of 2001, as the war with Iraq loomed, she dropped out of Dartmouth, and drove down  to CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, where she’d had an internship previously.

“I was obsessed,” Zaleski said. She followed the news trail from her Ivy League school in rural New Hampshire to work at the War Desk in Atlanta, where she worked with those embedded in Iraq. After her time there, she drove back up north to Dartmouth and finished her degree in history. But soon after, she was drawn back again and worked on American Morning as a graphics editor.

She was in the office by 2 a.m. Her life revolved around the job. One grueling day her bosses at CNN said Katharine could end up just like them.

“It was a revelation where you know it’s just not worth it. Places like CNN can be production lines if you’re not out in the field,” Zaleski said.

Still in her early twenties and a little disillusioned, she took off to India with her boyfriend and now fiancé Rufus, an artist, to get some perspective on her place in the news cycle. Zaleski came back to her hometown of New York and put out feelers for something on the less-traditional side of media.

Those feelers led her to a brand-new site called  The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s liberal counterpart to Web sites such as The Drudge Report. Zaleski was one of the first employees and joined just two weeks after the site launched in 2005.  Huffington started it with ex-A.O.L. exec Kenneth Lerer, using her celebrity and wealth to position herself as a media force to be reckoned with.

HuffPo, as its known, looks like an online newspaper at first glance. It’s got six main verticals, emulating traditional jumps and sections. You can scroll through to Kanye West’s antics, along with Obama’s health plan and celebrity bloggers galore. Today, you can read about David Letterman’s affair along side Fareed Zakaria’s piece on questionable nuclear threat.

Though it’s known as an aggregation site, it also has over 2,000 original bloggers, from John Cusack to Nora Ephron to Larry David, as well as lesser-known young talent. And Zaleski takes offense to the negative connotation the word “aggregation” can sometimes carry.

“Anyone can aggregate,” she added. “Machines can do that, but you have to be incredibly smart and attentive to your community, to be successful. You have to get them involved. Good aggregation isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds.”

And all of the doom-and-gloom about the death of journalism doesn’t faze Zaleski either.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “There’s always going to be an interest in maintaining the Fourth Estate.” She does see news organizations righting their ships, though “painfully.”

A point of pride at HuffPo is the sense of the community. “The wall is lowering between the news organization and the user,” she said. “The thing that makes Huffington Post really different is our robust community. People want ownership over their news.”

She has, in her own way, taken ownership over how she puts out news, saying great stories are always “sacred,” no matter what form they come in. She sees herself continuing to produce and manage news content long after the current state of flux in media is a distant memory.