The Huffington Post has found its new editor-in-chief, the website announced on Tuesday.
New York Times veteran Lydia Polgreen (above right) will succeed founder Arianna Huffington, who left the company in August to launch health and wellness website Thrive Global.
“I feel like we’re living in a moment right now where media has to fundamentally rethink its position vis-a-vis power,” Polgreen said, according to HuffPost.
“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.”
Although it was hard to leave the Times after 15 years, Polgreen said the HuffPost role was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” calling the site a “truly great global, progressive news platform” that has the “potential and the possibility of really meeting this populist moment that we’re living in and meeting people where they actually are.”
HuffPost CEO Jared Grusd described Polgreen as “somebody who is mission-driven, somebody who believes in values and very specifically, the deep authentic values of journalism and the role of journalism in today’s marketplace.”
Polgreen served as the Times’ West Africa bureau chief, South Asia bureau chief and Johannesburg bureau chief.
The Columbia University graduate also acted as deputy international editor, helping to oversee the launch of The New York Times en Español, and in April, she became the editorial director for NYT Global, part of a $50 million investment to grow the paper’s reach into multiple international markets.