The Huffington Post Media Group has teamed up with the former boss of broadcaster Al Jazeera to launch an Arabic-language edition.
The news site is working with Wadah Khanfar, CEO of Integral Media Strategies and former Director General of Al Jazeera Network to launch ‘HuffPost Arabi’.
The site is pitched as “a first-of-its-kind online news destination for the 300+ million people in the Arab world, offering a combination of original reporting by independent journalists and a blog platform for people across the region to share their thoughts, opinions and commentary. The new editorial team will be based in London.
The new site will be built on The Huffington Post’s online news platform, with Integral Media Strategies’ network of on-the-ground journalists contributing editorial content from across the Arab World.
The announcement was jointly made by Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, and Wadah Khanfar, CEO Integral Media Strategies.
“Bringing HuffPost to the Arab world has been a dream for us since we launched our first international edition a little more than three years ago,” said Huffington. “There’s such a great need — not only in the region, but all over the world — to bring more Arab voices into the conversation and deepen the world’s understanding of life in the Arab world, from its problems to its accomplishments to its untapped potential. Wadah Khanfar has been a great friend and supporter of HuffPost for years, helping to guide our coverage of the Middle East, and I’m thrilled to be partnering with him and Integral Media Strategies to create a truly independent news source at such an important time in the region’s history.”
“The Huffington Post Arabi is a great opportunity for the region. The Arab World is a dynamic and vibrant news environment,” said Khanfar. “Now Arabic creators of news and opinion content will have a fresh and exciting online community where their voices and ideas can be heard and shared. Our audiences will be able to access and engage with news and factual content specifically customized for the Arab World’s new Digital Generation.”
“As a rapidly-developing region with a population of over 300 million people, a strong presence in the Arab World is critical for any truly global media organization,” said Jimmy Maymann, CEO of The Huffington Post Media Group. “You only have to look at the 16 percent annual growth in Internet usage and 64 percent annual growth in digital advertising spend over the last 5 years to understand the scale of this opportunity for us.”
Global editions of The Huffington Post have 97.5 million unique visitors a month (comScore, June 2014). HuffPost’s integrated global newsroom has hundreds of editors across 11 countries who collaborate in real-time to create content in 8 languages using a custom unified tech platform and tens of thousands of bloggers contributing their own views.
