Staffers there suggested Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple “examine whether the finite editorial resources of the Huffington Post are being imprudently plowed into book promotion for the editor-in-chief”.
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It was about this time previous year that Arianna Huffington, the high-profile president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, confirmed she would remain on the job until 2019.
“I really thought I could do both, but as we started building it up, I realized that it really needed my full attention”.
“Running both companies would have involved working around the clock”, she said in a press release, “which would be a betrayal of the very principles of Thrive I’ve been writing and speaking about”.
Huffington signed a new four-year contract in June 2015 to stay on as chairwoman, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. The contract allayed concerns that she would leave the company after Verizon’s $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company. More recently, Verizon announced its plans to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion.
World-renowned entrepreneur Arianna Huffington has stepped down as the editor-of-chief at The Huffington Post as she embarks on the next major phase of her career journey. Her co-founders, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti, would later go on to spearhead the viral sensation Buzzfeed.
“This has been a very hard decision, but in many ways an inevitable one, given my commitment to building Thrive into a company that has a global impact on how we work and live”, she wrote.
She founded The Huffington Post in 2005, and it grew to become one of the biggest online media players. It is unclear how the Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post brands will be integrated once the sale is complete.
And shortly after, Huffington had won a Pulitzer Prize, was named in Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people and Forbes listed her among the most powerful women.
A left-leaning counterpoint to conservative news aggregators like the Drudge Report, “HuffPo”, as many called it, routinely repackaged stories and borrowed liberally from other news outlets, sparking tensions among traditional media but also creating a traffic-chasing model that has persisted and expanded today.
Huffington will surely be missed, but we can all expect lots of success from her next venture. She also mentioned that they seek to raise awareness about stress and how to transform our culture from surviving to thriving.
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She joined the board of Uber in April, for instance, a move that caused a stir among newsroom employees, though she said she would recuse herself from coverage of the company.
