Arianna Huffington, the former conservative commentator who co-founded and built the Huffington Post into one of the web’s most prominent liberal media giants, said Thursday she will step down to focus on a new health-and-wellness start-up.
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“I thought HuffPost would be my last act”, the mogul said in a tweet. Earlier this year she published “The Sleep Revolution”, a book about getting more sleep.
“While Huffington Post did some reporting that was distinctive, mostly it made its way by aggregating existing content” and, he noted, “packaging it with an SEO obsession”. “Today, it’s clear that was an illusion”, she added.
When Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion past year, I predicted that AOL’s content brands, including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget, would be sold off, simply because Verizon wouldn’t have any real use for them.
The move comes a few weeks after the Huffington Post’s parent company, Verizon, acquired the fading digital powerhouse Yahoo.
Huffington is leaving now to focus on her startup, Thrive Global, which is devoted to health and wellness.
Her departure creates a whopping, if not unexpected, void, at the Huffington Post, a pioneering news venture that had an enormous impact on the way online newsrooms publish around the world. It also figured out how to generate traffic and clicks in the era just before social media, becoming one of the most popular news sites in the country. Verizon in turn acquired AOL previous year.
But the management structure created tension, and by mid-2012, her portfolio was scaled back and all of the AOL sites aside from Huffington Post were removed from her purview.
Frank Sesno, a former CNN correspondent and now director of George Washington University’s media and public affairs school, said she caught the wave of a changing media world – but whether she advanced journalism is debatable.
In a press release, Thrive Global says it will provide trainings, e-courses and present “scientific findings from experts in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, productivity, sports, and sleep”. Last year, she authored another book on well-being, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder.
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She said she would be stepping down as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, which now operates in 10 languages and has a user base of over 200 million. It also has an online video network called HuffPost Live.
