The Huffington Post will soon be without its editor-in-chief after Arianna Huffington announced she would be leaving the media giant to launch a new HR start-up instead.
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Huffington, who has been the site’s editor-in-chief, will now head a new health, wellness and productivity startup. Huffington said that she had been thinking about her future in the website for a while and was only waiting for a closing funding round for Thrive Global.
In late July, Verizon announced the $4.8 billion acquisition Yahoo, which has its own hefty media business. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
In an interview, she was quoted as saying she initially thought she could multitask and handle both businesses but realized as time went on and things fell into place that she needed to devote her full attention to her personal business.
More precisely, the hierarchy is this: The Huffington Post was sold to AOL five years ago, and then Verizon bought AOL last year.
As Huffington moves into another phase of her life, she said leading both companies would be contradictory to her new startup’s mission.
Corrections & Amplifications: The Huffington Post was co-founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti.
Huffington said that the Yahoo buyout had nothing to do with her decision to leave, according to an article on The Huffington Post.
In addition to acting as the site’s president and editor-in-chief, the former political commentator and writer also penned health and wellness books like, “Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom and Wonder”, and “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time”. Huffington said that the site it is about all its employees and not about her.
After achieving a high profile as a media executive, Huffington’s interest in balancing work and rest increased over time.
It recently closed a Series A funding round ahead of a launch in November.
In the release, Huffington suggested the irony that leading the two companies would have caused her to burn out.
At its founding in 2005, Huffington Post was built on the luster of unpaid celebrity bloggers and the sweat of lightly paid junior journalists who aggregated, condensed and lightly rewrote coverage from other news sites around the world.
In a press release, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said of HuffPost that AOL and Verizon “are committed to continuing its growth and the groundbreaking work Arianna pioneered”.
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But in recent years, the Huffington Post began enlarging its staff to pursue original reporting and broadened its coverage to include new topic “verticals”, such as online commentary, video and “What’s Working”, a channel about solutions and inspirational news.
