Arianna Huffington leaves the Huffington Post to focus on a startup
Arianna Huffington has announced that she's leaving the Huffington Post after 11 years at the helm of the company to focus her attention on a new startup on health and wellness.
Huffington's name is synonymous with digital journalism, having built one of the first major online media destinations. HuffPo continues to be one of the most-trafficked news websites.
No replacement for the editor-in-chief position was immediately announced.
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Huffington, 66, made the announcement on Twitter, saying that she'll step down as HuffPo's editor-in-chief to run the new venture, named Thrive Global:
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Thrive Global also announced a Series A funding round on Thursday.
In a press release, she said: “When I decided to create Thrive Global, I thought it would be possible to build a startup and continue as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. Today, it’s clear that was an illusion."
Huffington's future at the site had been in question for some time. In June last year, Huffington signed a deal to remain HuffPo's president and editor-in-chief while launching Thrive Global. But in an interview she said she realized that the new project needed her full attention.
“It is important to know when one door closes and another opens and I felt that moment had arrived.”
Huffington's decision may have been sealed by Verizon's decision to acquire Yahoo, which includes a large news operation. HuffPo is owned by AOL, which is owned by Verizon.
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HuffPo's importance to digital publishing is hard to overstate. Huffington co-founded the Huffington Post in 2005 along with Kenneth Lerer, Andrew Breitbart and Jonah Peretti. Lerer and Peretti went on to found BuzzFeed. Breitbart would also found his own eponymous digital media company.
In its early days, HuffPo specialized in writing posts targeted at what people were looking for in search engines -- best embodied by posts like "what time is the Super Bowl" -- and aggregation of news from other media outlets. Those strategies, now commonplace, were controversial at the time.
As the site grew under Huffington, it also began to do more serious and original journalism. In 2012, HuffPo reporter David Wood won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the lives of wounded veterans and their families.
HuffPo was far from the only media website that grew big on search engine strategies, but it was one of the few that deftly managed the shift to social media distribution. The site remains the most shared publisher on Facebook, according to NewsWhip.
