HuffPost’s top editor leaves for a podcasting company

In another shake-up of the digital news landscape, HuffPost’s editor-in-chief, Lydia Polgreen, announced Friday that she was departing the website for a sector that many in media see as a safer bet: podcasting.

Polgreen, who has led the website since 2016, said in a statement posted on Twitter that she would step down this month to become the head of content at Gimlet Media, the podcast studio known for shows like “Reply All” and “Crimetown.” Gimlet was bought last year by the audio streaming giant Spotify along with Anchor, which makes tools for producing podcasts, in a combined deal worth nearly $340 million.

“Gimlet has built the greatest audio team in the world, and I’m so lucky to have the chance to learn from them,” Polgreen wrote. “Together we have the opportunity to chart the future of the spoken word on the world’s most powerful audio platform.”

FILE -- Lydia Polgreen, the editor in chief of Huffpost, in New York on Jan. 10, 2018. Polgreen announced on Friday, March 6, 2020, that she is departing the website, one of the giants of the digital news landscape, to enter what many in media consider to be the next big thing: podcasting. (Vincent Tullo/The New York Times)

Polgreen is the second top editor of a major digital news outlet to depart in recent weeks, as online publishers continue to struggle. The former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, Ben Smith, left that website in February after eight years to become a media columnist at The New York Times.

Verizon Media, which owns HuffPost, has not yet announced Polgreen’s successor. In an email sent Friday to HuffPost staff that was obtained by The New York Times, Alex Wallace, Verizon’s head of media and content, said Polgreen’s staff would report to her “for now.”

“Lydia and the HuffPost team have increased premium revenue, grown membership, and built a fiercely loyal audience,” Wallace wrote in the email.

Before she joined HuffPost in 2016 as only the second editor-in-chief of the site, Polgreen was an associate masthead editor at The New York Times, where she had previously served as a foreign correspondent and deputy international editor. She took over at HuffPost when Arianna Huffington, the founder, stepped down.

Huffington launched the HuffPost, then known as The Huffington Post, in 2005 as a progressive website — even though one of its co-founders was future conservative media impresario Andrew Breitbart. Over the years, it shifted from being known mainly for its unfiltered contributor pages and celebrity bloggers to a location for independent, in-depth journalism. In 2012, it won a Pulitzer Prize for reporter David Wood’s series on wounded veterans.

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