|
| VIEW EVENT INFORMATION: Arianna Huffington |
|
 |
How Arianna Huffington Lost Her Newsroom |
|
|
|
|
|
|
About the person Arianna Huffington:
Art: Corporation, Politics, Television
Genres: TV Journalism, TV News, Activism, CEO, Co-Founder, Entrepreneur, Executive, Founder, Information Technology, Internet, Management, Media, President, Social Media, Conservatism, Modern Liberalism, Social Conservatism, Economic Liberalism, Republican Party |
|
Notable Organizations: Vanity Fair
|
|
| The Huffington Post’s namesake founder, who stepped down as editor in chief last month, built an iconic media company in record time. Then, after a decade at the helm, she left suddenly. This article, the first in a two-part series, reveals one of the factors that may have contributed to her departure: a capricious management style that alienated many of the journalists who worked for her.
In August 2014, Arianna Huffington, the wealthy, Greek-born co-founder of the Huffington Post, got a brief e-mail from her friend Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria, the television host and journalist, had recently come under intense media scrutiny amid allegations that he had lifted passages from other writers’ work and used them without proper attribution—new instances of an offense that had already led to his suspension from both CNN and Time, in 2012. During the first kerfuffle, Zakaria had acknowledged making “a terrible mistake”; now he was publicly denying the charges. Either way, Zakaria wasn’t getting in touch with Huffington just to lament his recent woes. He was e-mailing on August 19 to express his unhappiness that the Huffington Post’s media desk had picked up the recent plagiarism story. He found it very painful. (Zakaria did not respond to a request to be interviewed. Huffington also declined my repeated requests to be interviewed for this story, but in a written response to questions, she denied receiving a complaint from Zakaria, even though she did.)
The e-mail had arrived at a pivotal time for Huffington. Rumors were circulating in the newsroom about her uneasy relationship with Tim Armstrong, the C.E.O. of AOL, the company that had purchased the HuffPost for $315 million three years earlier. An idea had already been floated to transform Huffington into a sort of semi-retired figurehead who would perform ceremonial tasks without wielding any real power—a covert operation, The New York Times later reported, code-named “Popemobile.” A looming corporate shake-up added still more uncertainty. At the time of the Zakaria incident, Verizon was eyeing AOL for a takeover—a $4.4 billion deal that would come to be announced 10 months later. |
|
|
| Leave Comments: |
|
|
|
|
|
