“I truly thought I could do both, however as we began developing it, I understood that it truly required my full consideration”, she said in a meeting. While she initially thought she could handle positions at both Huffington Post and Thrive Global, she realized that she was wrong and chose to step down to focus on building her new venture.
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AOL bought the Greek-born Huffington’s namesake site in 2011 for $315M with Verizon acquiring AOL for $4.4B past year.
Huffington declined Inc.’s request for comment, but noted in a press release that she found it too hard to run both firms simultaneously, especially as Thrive Global grew quickly “from an idea to reality”. Last year’s acquisition of AOL by Verizon placed the group under the aegis of the telecom giant, but with AOL run as an independent unit. In a staff memo, Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, which owns the Huffington Post, said an interim editorial committee of other top editors will perform Arianna’s role for now and be involved in an ongoing search for a new editor-in-chief.
As Huffington moves into another phase of her life, she said leading both companies would be contradictory to her new startup’s mission.
On Thursday morning, The Huffington Post home page linked directly to a Wall Street Journal article announcing her departure.
Arianna Huffington is stepping down as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post and turning her attention to her startup, Thrive Global, after attracting investors and hiring staff.
In a media release, Ms Huffington, 66, says it is “a corporate and consumer well-being and productivity platform”. There was no immediate word on who would succeed Huffington as editor-in-chief. It was to promote her book The Sleep Revolution. Thrive Global is expected to launch formally in November 2016.
A more realistic explanation, according to a person familiar with her new venture, is that things have changed at Verizon, which bought AOL a year ago and is now going to swallow up Yahoo.
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AOL acquired it for $315 million in 2011, and The Huffington Post became the first digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2012.
