Huffington, 66, has held talks in recent weeks with venture capitalists to fund her new media company, Thrive Global, which will launch in November and provide content and training seminars on wellness. What began as a left-leaning answer to the Drudge Report, comprised primarily of aggregation and blog posts from friends, morphed over the years into a major news organization and digital media company that’s expanded into 15 countries. After fainting and breaking a cheekbone from burnout in 2007, Ms Huffington wrote two books promoting a sustainable work-life balance.
Advertisement
Subsequently, Verizon’s acquisition of AOL past year raised questions as to Huffington ‘s status with the company, reinforced by her own announcement several months ago of her interest in starting a new business.
Arianna Huffington, photographed at AOL, in New York, NY on Thursday, April 11, 2013.
“Running both companies would have involved working around the clock, which would be a betrayal of the very principles of Thrive I’ve been writing and speaking about”, she wrote “To to truly thrive means knowing when the time has come to close one chapter and start the next, and for me that time has arrived”. This action made it clear that the news portal is against the candidate as a person and not only for not agreeing with his political stands but because from the beginning of the electoral race, The Huffington Post predicted what was going to be Trump’s approach. The only way to build it is to do ti with full attention.
How or if The Huffington Post will change without its last remaining co-founder remains to be seen.
In addition to aggregating news, the Huffington Post features original reporting.
Born in Greece in 1950 and the ex-wife of Republican Congressmen Michael Huffington, in 2003 Huffington ran for California governor as an independent candidate and in 2005 founded – with other partners – the online daily The Huffington Post. It was the first pure digital media group to win a Pulitzer Prize, capturing the award in 2012 for a series of reports on wounded United States veterans. The site recently drew almost 200 million monthly unique visitors globally.
Huffington stayed on after AOL bought the site in 2011 for $315 million. But rumors swirled about her role after AOL was sold to Verizon a year ago for $4.4 billion.
Advertisement
Verizon last month also announced it would buy Yahoo, whose online news business closely parallels The Huffington Post’s.
