When Verizon (VZ) decided to pay $4.4 billion in May 2015 to acquire AOL, it begged the question what CEO Lowell McAdam planned to do with The Huffington Post and its mercurial founder and always-on leader, Arianna Huffington.
Verizon, of course, purchased AOL for its powerhouse advertising technology and the potential of integrating those operations with its wireless business, the country's largest, and most recently with the acquisition of Yahoo!'s (YHOO) core operations for $4.8 billion. Huffington Post and AOL's other websites such as Engadget were nice additions but were never going to be McAdam's focus.
In this context, Huffington's departure from the website she created, announced Thursday, isn't a surprise. Known widely for being a strong-willed if unpredictable editor-in-chief, Huffington was never going to blend easily into Verizon's top-down, button-up corporate culture despite the company's clear interest in owning more media content.
But Huffington's exit from the website she created 11 years ago doesn't minimize the impact she had on journalism, political discourse and the nearly dated act of blogging. Websites such as Twitter (TWTR) and LinkedIn (LNKD) and Tumblr, which Verizon now owns, wouldn't be the same if not for Huffington headlining her web site.
"Arianna took a niche medium and made it into a mass medium," said Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and author of his own blog, BuzzMachine. "She brought blogs to scale; she saw the opportunity to create a space for people to talk, and often with a wide diversity of viewpoints. Arianna's impact is indeed huge."
The Huffington Post began operating in 2005 just months after George W. Bush was inaugurated for a second presidential term and opposition to the Iraq War was expanding. A one-time conservative pundit and wife of a former Republican congressman, she ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 2003, turning that campaign into Ariannaonline.com.
