The Huffington Post is restructuring its video operation, and as a result, it will decrease its investment in one of its most ambitious original programming experiments. According to a company memo obtained by Politico, HuffPo is consolidating its four video units into one, and the biggest casualty of that shift will be daily streaming program HuffPost Live.
HuffPost Live won’t go away completely, but it will no longer maintain its eight-hours-per-day broadcast schedule. Instead, it will only show up for major news events, and HuffPo will instead dedicate more resources toward shareable video, documentaries, and original series. When Politico reached out to HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington, she declined to comment on whether the restructuring will involve personnel cuts, though she did say that “HuffPost Live remains an integral part of HuffPost.”
The decision to scale back HuffPost Live comes just weeks after Roy Sekoff, who served as the live program’s head since its inception in 2012, left the company. “The changes we’re making will position us to be the dominant global media company in video in this ever-changing media environment,” wrote Huffington in the memo.
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We already have a pretty good idea of the sort of programs HuffPo’s consolidated video unit will now focus on. The publication’s operates a short, shareable daily morning news segment called Rise, which was initially launched by its parent company, AOL. The documentaries and original series discussed in HuffPo’s memo could eventually launch on HuffPost 24, a 24-hour news service that was originally slated for a 2015 debut.
The bottom line is that HuffPo wants to allocate its resources to videos that will shine on social media. “We’ll continue to be laser-focused on creating shareable video,” reads the company’s memo.
