The Huffington Post has rebranded as HuffPost and redesigned the site on Tuesday morning, as part of what Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen calls a broader reimagining of its mission following the departure of founder Arianna Huffington last August.
Polgreen said the name change reflects “what our readers call us anyway,” while the site now features photos and headlines with a “meme-like quality.”
“Sometimes it’s a good idea just to embrace the name that your audience has chosen,” Polgreen said in a statement published on HuffPost. “It’s shorter, it’s snappier and gets us a more compact look.”
CEO Jared Grusd and Polgreen have a new vision, but still credit founder Arianna Huffington for everything she contributed to the company.
“Everything that HuffPost is today stands on the shoulders of what Arianna Huffington built,” Polgreen said. “So I think that it’s in no way meant to diminish or distance us from that legacy because we’re incredibly proud of it. But I think it’s just trying to catch up with the times and how people now think of us.”
Huffington, who founded HuffPo 12 years ago and built it into a leading digital media site, gave up her role as president and editor-in-chief last August to focus on a startup called Thrive Global focused on health and wellness issues.
In 2015, she signed a new contract through 2019 with AOL, which had acquired her namesake company in 2011 for $315 million. But her position — as well as the future of HuffPo — had come into question since AOL was acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion.