Journalist Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of The Huffington Post, announced Thursday that she will resign as editor-in-chief of the online daily to devote herself to her new project, Thrive Global, a firm focusing on health and well-being.
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At one point a conservative commentator, Huffington was responsible for extraordinary growth at the liberal online blog and news site that she co-founded in 2005.
Huffington, 66, said she is turning her attention to the soon-to-launch Thrive Global, which she had originally planned to run while remaining at the Huffington Post.
Many Huffington Post writers and contributors, however, are unpaid, and Huffington has argued that their visibility on a site with more than 100 million unique visitors a month is invaluable.
Huffington said that Thrive Global’s mission is to “change the way we work and live by ending the collective delusion that burnout is a necessary price for success”. AOL’s parent company, Verizon, is buying Yahoo, which overlaps in some ways with AOL and The Huffington Post.
Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, called Huffington “a visionary”, noting the company “is grateful for what she has done in creating such an iconic brand”. “Today, it’s clear that was an illusion”, she said in a statement.
Arianna Huffington announced on Thursday that she will step down as Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post. “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”, she says.
“I step down as editor-in-chief filled with gratitude for our awesome HuffPost team and for what we’ve built together, and for [AOL CEO] Tim Armstrong who had the vision to buy HuffPost five years ago and to support from day one our global expansion”, said Huffington in a statement.
There’s no immediate word on who will replace Huffington at the HuffPost helm. She has published several books on health and wellness, including Thrive and The Sleep Revolution, and she has become a champion of a good night’s sleep.
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This story is corrected to show that AOL bought The Huffington Post five years ago.
