Last week we had our first story re-published on Huffington Post as part of a new partnership.

We recently agreed to send them a story about once a week for use on Huffington Post High School, which has content written by teens. Our sister publication in New York, YCteen, has a similar arrangement. The first story we sent was our November-December cover, “What now?”, by an undocumented immigrant who worries he won’t be able to go to college. It’s a good story about a hot-button issue so we weren’t surprised that it got as much attention as it did.

So far, the story has 447 comments — looking through them it appeared that some were supportive but many were hostile toward illegal immigrants and our writer, and some were ignorant of the issue. But with a topic like this we weren’t surprised by all the negative comments. We were happy to see that the story had nearly 300 likes on Facebook and was shared about 290 times.

We also had more traffic than usual to our website and the story page, including 600 page views for the story on Sunday, which is a huge spike over our usual weekend traffic. It was heartening to see that people were clicking through to our website to finish reading the story (Huffington Post agreed to post half the story and send readers to our website for the rest).

I talked to the writer yesterday when he came to the office. He had seen his article on Huffington Post and had waded through the comments. He wasn’t upset and it turned into a lesson about the power of the media to reach people but a cautionary tale about how on the Internet you can’t control what people will say.

With so many people seeing the story, we’re looking forward to continuing the partnership.