After co-founding the Huffington Post 11 years ago, Arianna Huffington announced Thursday morning that she would be leaving the media outlet to focus on the launch of her new health and wellness startup, Thrive Global.
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“But I’ve made a decision to step down as HuffPost’s editor-in-chief to run my new venture, Thrive Global”, Huffington posted.
It was upon the securement of funding for Thrive Global last week that Huffington decided she could no longer lead the Huffington Post while also heading her new venture.
“Arianna is a visionary who built The Huffington Post into a truly transformative news platform”, Armstrong said.
“I step down as editorinchief filled with gratitude for our unbelievable HuffPost team and for what we’ve built together”, she said in the statement. The Web site drew the ire of the media community for not paying its contributors for content and at the end of past year hundreds of Huffington Post staffers voted to form a union, which was recognized by the company at the start of 2016.
The Athens, Greece-born Huffington co-founded the site in 2005 with Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti, and it quickly became known as one of the most visited websites in a new wave of opinion blogging and news aggregation. In 2012, it won the Pulitzer Prize for a series on wounded veterans.
Lately, Verizon Inc has been focusing towards digital media and advertising making a continuous push towards buying web portals, similarly as it bought Yahoo Inc. for $4.8 billion.
Huffington sold HuffPost to AOL in 2011 for US$315 million, but remained as editor-in-chief.
The Huffington Post didn’t immediately name her replacement.
Jennifer Aniston used the powers of the pen when she wrote a scathing blog post for the Huffington Post to slam pregnancy rumors and to attack the tabloids for body shaming women on a daily basis.
‘It is important to know when one door closes and another opens and I felt that moment had arrived’.
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The Huffington Post is owned by AOL. Called Thrive Global, it focuses on health, well-being and productivity in the workplace. 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”. “Today, it’s clear that was an illusion”, she said in a statement.
