Arianna Huffington acknowledged her portfolio at AOL is being scaled back to include only The Huffington Post, undoing a structure put in place when her website was acquired by AOL last year.
After buying The Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL gave Huffington editorial oversight of all its properties, including tech-news site TechCrunch, the patch.com network of local news sites, MovieFone and MapQuest. In addition, more than 30 AOL properties, such as Politics Daily, were absorbed by The Huffington Post.
The management structure created tensions with staff at some of the properties. Patch management, for instance, differed with Huffington over strategy for the local news sites, according to people familiar with the matter. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington quit in a public spat with Huffington.
“What I asked for is for us to be more independent, to have technology, marketing and [business development] now into Huffington Post, so that we can accelerate all our growth, and for me to be freed up to just concentrate exclusively on HuffPost,” Huffington told an audience at the Business Insider’s Startup 2012 conference Thursday.
Huffington said the restructuring was finalized this week because the transfer of the last of the 33 AOL brands that The Huffington Post was to absorb was completed Monday.
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