The Huffington Post has made an excellent move in appointing Lydia Polgreen as editor-in-chief of the outlet.
Polgreen, who has been with the New York Times since 2002, was acting as the Times’ associate masthead editor and editorial director of NYT Global when the offer was made.
“To me this felt like an unmissable opportunity to take a massive journalistic platform that was at an inflection point and think about what the possibilities are of what it could be,” she said according to the Times. “This is not about leaving The Times. This is about seeing a really big opportunity that I frankly didn’t go looking for but came to me, and wanting to grasp it.”
After running the company since 2005, founder Arianna Huffington stepped down in August to focus on her new health and wellness venture, Thrive Global. According to HuffPo, “During a Tuesday all-hands meeting introducing Polgreen to the newsroom, [CEO Jared] Grusd said a tearful Huffington told him over the phone that the site ‘could not have chosen a better, more capable, more fearless leader to replace her.’”
Polgreen grew up in West Africa and worked as a foreign correspondent in South Africa, India, and West Africa, and had also served as a deputy international editor. She said she was drawn to The Huffington Post’s “explicitly progressive mandate and identity.”
Heading into the Trump administration, Polgreen said, “I feel like we’re living in a moment right now where media has to fundamentally rethink its position vis-a-vis power.” She explained, “I think that the election of Donald Trump and the basic difficulty that the media had in anticipating it tells us something really profound about the echo chamber in which we live, the ways in which journalism has failed to reach beyond its own inner limits.”
“The DNA of The Huffington Post is fundamentally progressive, but I think that has a really capacious meaning and comes to include so many of the things that motivated not just the people who were rah rah Bernie or who voted for Hillary Clinton, but also many, many people in the United States who voted for Trump, who have fundamental concerns about the way the country is moving and the future,” she stated.
