THE ARIANNA CHRONICLES

The Huffington Post's namesake founder built an enormously influential media company in record time. Then, after a decade at the helm, she left suddenly. Here are some of the factors that may have contributed to her departure

WILLIAM D. COHAN

VANITYFAIR.COM/SEPTEMBER 7 & 8, 2016

In August 2014, Arianna Huffington, the wealthy, Greek-born cofounder of the Huffington Post, got a brief e-mail from her friend Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria, the television host and journalist, had recently come under intense media scrutiny amid allegations that he had lifted passages from other writers' work and used them without proper attribution—new instances of an offense that had already led to his suspension from both CNN and Time, in 2012. During the first kerfuffle, Zakaria had acknowledged making "a terrible mistake"; now he was publicly denying the charges. Either way, Zakaria wasn't getting in touch with Huffington just to lament his recent woes. He was e-mailing on August 19 to express his unhappiness that the Huffington Post's media desk had picked up the recent plagiarism story. He found it very painful. (Zakaria did not respond to a request to be interviewed. Huffington also declined my repeated requests to be interviewed for this story, but in a written response to questions, she denied receiving a complaint from Zakaria, even though she did.)

The e-mail had arrived at a pivotal time for Huffington. Rumors were circulating in the newsroom about her uneasy relationship with Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, the company that had purchased the HuffPost for $315 million three years earlier. An idea had already been floated to transform Huffington into a sort of semiretired figurehead who would perform ceremonial tasks without wielding any real power— a covert operation, The New York Times later reported, codenamed "Popemobile." A looming corporate shake-up added still more uncertainty. At the time of the Zakaria incident, Verizon was eyeing AOL for a takeover—a $4.4 billion deal that would come to be announced 10 months later.

Huffington, meanwhile, had no intention of relinquishing power at the organization she had cofounded nearly a decade earlier, in 2005, against such long odds. Despite a relative lack of experience in journalism, business, and technology—as a wealthy divorcee who had written several books and unsuccessfully run for governor of California—she had turned the Huffington Post into one of the most recognizable media brands of our time. Within a decade, the site became part of the media firmament and Huffington became a global brand unto herself. She was a regular at the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos; a ubiquitous talking head on television; a budding lifestyle guru; and the keeper of one of the more prodigious Rolodexes in the industry. She counted among her friends everyone from Charlie Rose to Ann Getty and Henry Kissinger to Barbara Walters. She divided her time between a mansion in Brentwood, California, and an $8 million apartment in S0H0.

During the site's earliest days, the support of Huffington's friends had supplied a patina of credibility to the fledgling organization. (It was national news, for instance, when the late Nora Ephron agreed to lead a vertical dedicated to divorce.) But as the Huffington Post grew, Huffington's friendships became an increasing source of concern and potential conflicts in the newsroom. According to numerous sources, Huffington protected her allies aggressively, even intemperately. The Zakaria incident was a perfect example. "That made her extremely angry," recalls a former editor who was in the newsroom that day.

Chapter Two/The Game Changers

It didn't matter that the story was being picked up across the digital landscape, or that Politico and other organizations made a strong case that Zakaria was guilty of plagiarism. Huffington, this former editor recalls, wanted to fire the people who she believed were responsible for running the HuffPost's story: Jack Mirkinson, the media editor; Gazelle Emami, the deputy features editor; and Catherine Taibi, the author of the article.

Mirkinson, who had been at the office night and day covering the racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, was home sleeping when Taibi's story was published; he was not even aware of its publication. (Emami had edited the piece in his absence.) Nevertheless, when Mirkinson woke up and checked his e-mail, he found a stream of angry messages from HuffPost higher-ups asking why the Zakaria article had been published. When Mirkinson got back to the office, Kate Palmer, the Huffington Post's managing editor, came looking for him.

According to one former insider, Huffington wanted both Taibi and Emami suspended for 10 days, on the grounds that they had failed to call Zakaria for a comment, even though that was not standard practice for an "aggregated" story—that is, one without any fresh reporting, gathered from reliable news organizations across the Web. And while Taibi's post had failed to include Zakaria's most recent public denial of the allegations, that was a shortcoming that could be easily fixed by appending a note to the piece later—and less than eight hours later, the HuffPost editors did just that.

Mirkinson argued to reduce his colleagues' suspensions, but was told that 10 days was already a compromise. After employees in the legal and human-resources departments of AOL became involved, however, the suspension was reduced to three days, with pay. Emami "was then raked over the coals for doing what she thought it was her job to do," this former insider recalls. ("Our handling of the story had to do with the fact that it violated a cardinal rule in the newsroom: to always seek a comment from a subject about whom a negative article is being written," Huffington e-mailed me. Suspensions were justified, she wrote, in order "to reinforce editorial standards important in the newsroom.")

Nevertheless, the effects of Zakaria-gate were apparently felt for months to come. Mirkinson left the Huffington Post soon afterward; he wrote a column at Salon and now works at Fusion. Taibi left too and is now a social-media editor at Bloomberg. In February 2015, Emami joined New York magazine as a senior editor at its Vulture.com website. (Mirkinson, Taibi, and Emami each declined to comment.)

"I think it really speaks to a broader point about Arianna," explains one person involved, "which is that when powerful people [she knows] get angry about something, it is by no means a guarantee that she will defend her staff.... Instead, what happens is often she will forward an e-mail from someone angry about something and she'll say, 'Explain this.'" ("I get emails with complaints all the time," Huffington e-mailed me in response, "some from well-known people and some from people I don't know." She continued: "I have never interfered to protect a friend—or an advertiser, for that matter—if the story was accurately reported.") But she did intervene on Zakaria's behalf.

This August, Huffington resigned as the editor in chief of the Huffington Post to focus on her new endeavor, Thrive Global, a brand devoted to wellness and disconnecting from the tech-and-media-obsessed landscape that Huffington herself helped create. Huffington's accomplishments during her decade-long tenure as editor are impressive. The news organization, which had been planned as a liberal antidote to the Drudge Report in the wake of John Kerry's presidential loss to George W. Bush, in 2004, is now the 154th most popular website in the world. It has published the work of successful journalists, such as Tim O'Brien, Tom Zeller, Peter Goodman, and Lisa Belkin. In 2012, it won a Pulitzer Prize for David Wood's 10-part series about life after war for America's soldiers.

What Huffington lacked in journalistic experience she compensated for with an almost preternatural capacity for marketing and promotion, coupled with an innate understanding about the possibilities of the Web. Huffington seemed to understand earlier than most that the Internet placed a high value on personal and personality-based writing, and that audiences were looking for content that spoke to their interests and didn't exactly mind if that content seemed slanted. (In fact, as the subsequent rise of Breitbart, among other niche sites, suggests, they often preferred it that way.) Huffington also realized that many of the people in her network were searching for a venue for their own musings, which might not all measure up to the same standard of quality, but provided a veritable buzz machine.

"I have never interfered to protect a friend— or an advertiser, for that matter— if the story was accurately reported."

Huffington says that a new round of financing for Thrive Global triggered her departure from the Huffington Post— that she could no longer run both organizations and that both "deserved a full-time, undistracted leader." But by the time of the Verizon deal, in May 2015, she appeared to be losing support from within her own newsroom. Some reporters and editors accused her of sacrificing the site's journalistic standards to accommodate her friends and agenda. "The ultimate priority at HuffPost is making the dictator look good," noted an anonymous Gawker piece that June. When someone from Huffington's personal network complained about an unflattering picture or an unfavorable article, "Arianna usually sides with her friends," the writer continued. "Work at HuffPost for a little while and you'll soon learn which people—Bill Maher, or Mika Brzezinski, or the Dalai Lama, to name just a few—need to be treated delicately."

The Dalai Lama, as The Washington Post has noted, enjoyed sacred status in the HuffPost newsroom, not just as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, but also as somebody Huffington particularly admired. In the fall of 2014, the athletic-apparel company Lululemon had entered into a partnership with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Lululemon agreed to contribute $750,000 over three years to the Dalai Lama Center for, among other things, researching the connection between the mind, body, and heart.

The alliance lit up the Internet. Lululemon had recently found itself backtracking from some insensitive comments made by its founder, Chip Wilson, about the physical shape of its ideal female customers. A blog on the Lululemon Web site attracted a swarm of comments, many of them about how Lululemon was trying to improve its image by "piggybacking" on the Dalai Lama's reputation.

The task fell to Kim Bhasin, the Huffington Post's senior retail editor, to aggregate the strands of the story into a post. "We knew that there was a potential land mine, because Arianna has a thing for the Dalai Lama," explained one former editor. "So we were extremely careful." (Huffington says the notion that the Dalai Lama is a personal friend is "extremely flattering but untrue.") To be safe, the editors decided not to quote any of the negative blog comments in Bhasin's story, which they might have otherwise done. "We were just going to paraphrase," the former editor says.

In addition, several requests for comment were made to the Dalai Lama Center. "So we do all that," the former editor continues. "We feel like we scrub it down to a gentle nub, not really criticizing Lululemon, just saying, 'Hey, can you believe Lululemon stepped on its own rake again?' You know, scrub it down, make it as innocuous as possible."

After waiting for a response from the Dalai Lama Center, Bhasin's story was posted on the Huffington Post's home page, on October 25, 2014, a Saturday morning. "Nobody has any problems with it," the former Huffington Post editor recalls. The next weekend, Huffington and the Dalai Lama were both featured speakers at a meditation symposium in Boston. Early the following week, Katie Nelson, the national editor, showed up at the desk of Mark Gongloff, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was then running the site's business and technology section. Nelson was "in a panic and says Arianna is on the war path," remembers the former editor, who was at the HuffPost throughout the whole Dalai Lama dustup. "Arianna lost her shit," this person recalls. "She said, 'Oh, this is atrocious. I can't believe they're calling the Dalai Lama greedy.' "

Various phone calls and meetings ensued. Whitney Snyder, the home-page editor, was critical of Bhasin's story after Huffington blew up, according to the former editor. "He said, 'This is problematic, we can't just be anonymously quoting like that!' There were no direct quotes, but [he said] 'We just can't be giving people' "—a reference to the anonymous people whose opinions they had paraphrased from the Lululemon Web site—"'a platform to say things like this.'" Bhasin's article was amended to include a note stating that the story had "been revised throughout...to remove anonymous quotations sourced from the Lululemon Web site."

But Huffington was not satisfied with simply changing the article. According to the former editor, Huffington wanted to fire Bhasin, Gongloff, and Kurt Heine, the news editor who edited the piece. In a conference call, the top editors at the Huffington Post, including John Montorio, Nelson, and Snyder, talked Huffington out of firing the three journalists. Instead, she instructed them to decide on an appropriate punishment for the infraction.

When Montorio came in the next morning, he handed down the verdict: All three would be suspended for one day, with pay. Others in the newsroom were stunned, says the former editor, who describes the scene as if "a nuclear bomb" had been detonated. "People don't get suspended in newsrooms unless they plagiarize or punch an editor or whatever, you know?"

Reached last month, one person with knowledge of the incident says "it was just a catastrophic mistake" that the three were suspended, "but that being sakL.it wasn't the easiest piece to defend, playing up these online comments." (For her part, Huffington defends the suspensions. "The story on the Dalai Lama Center," she e-mailed me, "violated another cardinal newsroom rule, by being entirely based on anonymous comments posted on the Internet." More broadly, Huffington maintained that "there has never been a different dynamic about how my friends were written about on HuffPost. And of course, countless articles have appeared critical of friends of mine.")

As with the Zakaria incident, the Dalai Lama episode would have a considerable ripple effect. Gongloff is now an editor at Bloomberg Gadfly; Bhasin covers retail for Bloomberg News. (Gongloff declined to comment and Bhasin could not be reached for comment.) "in general, if you do things like that, people will get the message," a former insider at the site told me. "it creates the opposite of what a newsroom should be, which is that you feel like you can pursue the story wherever it goes and whomever it's about."

Covering companies to which Huffington had a personal connection was also a dicey proposition. After Huffington delivered a speech at a Walmart function, one source familiar with the matter told me, a Walmart board member complained. "it was a constant struggle to do Walmart stories there," says the former editor. (Huffington says she never gave a paid speech to Walmart and has never been contacted by a Walmart board member. She then cited a dozen critical Huffington Post stories about the company.)

But in a May 2013 story idea meeting, Ryan Grim, the HuffPost's Washington bureau chief, said that Emran Hossain had been doing a great job covering the garment-factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people. Someone wondered aloud if Walmart purchased clothing made in the sweatshop. Grim said his team was investigating which companies the sweatshop was supplying. According to contemporaneous notes of the meeting, Huffington "stressed that, given the sensitivities with WalMart, we need to be absolutely sure about any WalMart connection before moving ahead." (It turned out that Walmart did not have any goods manufactured in the factory.)

Then there was Uber. Huffington was known to be friendly with Travis Kalanick, the company's cofounder and CEO. A former editor tells me that Huffington Post journalists followed an unwritten policy of not publishing Kalanick's tweets, which were often newsworthy and provocative. "That was the level of obsession with some of these friends of Arianna," says the former editor. "Everyone was terrified and lived in fear." Last April, Huffington joined Uber's board. (Huffington maintains that she never intervened to stop any Uber story—she sent along links to 11 pieces that ran—and says, "I have to confess [sorry Travis] that I do not even follow him on Twitter.")

UPDATE

In August 2018, Huffington, who published the book The Sleep Revolution the previous year, wrote an open letter to billionaire inventor Elon Musk urging him to get some sleep.

One Huffington Post writer told me it was difficult enough just doing serious journalism without having to deal with Huffington's idiosyncrasies, "it can be pretty painful on its own," he said of being a reporter, "and it really makes it extra hard when at the end of the day, after all the effort is put into the story, then you have to deal with her and her sort of nonjournalistic ideals, like using her personal beliefs to pressure you into compromising your integrity. That is just a downer. It just sucked." But Montorio, who worked at The New York Times, Newsday, and The Washington Star before the Huffington Post, told me that Huffington was no more "off the wall" than other top editors for whom he has worked. "Leadership is tough," he says, "it's tough to be sitting at the top of the newsroom. You're never going to make everyone happy. You're probably not going to make many people happy at all."

The tension between good journalism and excessive corner-office control came to a boil when Jason Cherkis, a skilled investigative reporter, spent a year reporting and writing an article for HuffPost about the treatment of heroin addiction in northern Kentucky. The subject had a lot of potential to become personal for Huffington. Her daughter, Christina, is a recovering cocaine addict who has written about her addiction in Glamour and discussed it on the Today show. Christina recovered using the 12-step abstinence process that is a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar addiction-relief programs.

Cherkis's piece, "Dying to Be Free," published in January 2015, revealed that, while total abstinence can sometimes be effective, the consequences can be fatal if the addict relapses. By contrast, Cherkis reported, drugs such as Suboxone, which block the craving for heroin, give addicts a chance to "right the ship" and get other aspects of their lives back in order before moving forward to the goal of going totally drug-free. The question that Cherkis's investigation posed was why the 12-step program was still so prevalent in the face of the success of Suboxone.

Ryan Grim edited Cherkis's piece, along with Montorio. While Huffington was aware of their work, one former editor remembers, she left them alone until the story hit the copy desk, nearly the final stop on the road to publication. The first draft was about 21,000 words. "She read it and lost her mind, because it criticized 12-step programs," recalls the former editor. "And she put a screeching halt to it." She handed the article over to a different editor, who removed many of the references that questioned the effectiveness of abstinence.

Cherkis felt that the re-editing compromised the accuracy of the article. Grim remained involved throughout the whole process, he says, and after considerable struggle Cherkis and Grim were eventually able to get the piece published in a form that satisfied Cherkis, and won considerable acclaim. But during three months of wrangling over the article's final form, Cherkis "was seething about it," recalls the former editor. (Cherkis declined to comment.)

Huffington says there was a lot of healthy "editorial backand-forth and heated discussions" and that it was her job as editor in chief to insist that parts of Cherkis's story be "more rigorously reported." But, she adds, "it was never dictating from the top." Her experience with her daughter, "who has dealt with drug addiction and has now been sober for four and a half years," she writes, "only meant that I had studied the subject of addiction very deeply, and wanted to make sure that the piece ...reflected all the latest science on the subject." She adds that Cherkis's piece won a Polk Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Grim and Montorio agree that Huffington's intervention did ultimately strengthen the article.

"I actually really do believe that she cares about journalism," says Tom Zeller, who worked for two years as a reporter at the Huffington Post, referring to his old boss. "She just is probably not quite hip to what it takes to produce the best stuff. The best stuff does happen at the Huffington Post, but you really have to push for it and it needs to perform, and if it doesn't, then it might get the axe." (Zeller, a former New York Times environmental reporter, left the Huffington Post in 2013.)

Huffington's own history as an author did not help her standing in the newsroom. She was accused of plagiarizing sections of her 1981 biography of opera diva Maria Callas; the matter was resolved out of court by paying Cabas's biographer Gerald Fitzgerald a settlement, which Huffington has described as being "in the low five figures." Her 1988 Picasso biography also provoked a plagiarism complaint, from a respected art historian who told Vanity Fair, in 1994, "What she did was steal 20 years of my work." In both instances, Huffington has denied the allegations.

In a February 2011 Vanity Fair piece, I explored a lawsuit against Huffington brought by Democratic political consultants Peter Daou and James Boyce, who claimed that Huffington stole their idea for creating a "liberal Drudge," after a December 3,2004, meeting at her Brentwood home— generally considered the foundational meeting of the site— that included such liberal stalwarts as Larry and Laurie David (then still married), David Geffen, and Norman Lear, among some 30 participants. Daou and Boyce claimed in their court filings that after they described the details of their idea for what became the Huffington Post at that meeting—and in subsequent follow-up communications—Ken Lerer, Huffington, and Jonah Peretti, the site's three cofounders, essentially cut them out of further planning.

Huffington and her public-relations team denied that the claims of Daou and Boyce had any merit. Huffington portrayed them as delusional. "We have now officially entered into Bizarro World," she and Lerer wrote in a statement released to Politico after the lawsuit was filed. "Boyce and Daou's claims are pure fantasy."

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Fantasy or not, AOL, which assumed liability for the lawsuit after it bought the Huffington Post, quietly settled with Boyce and Daou in May 2014, paying them a rumored total of around $10 million. Huffington supposedly started crying and apologizing in the judge's office when he directed the parties to reach a settlement. Contacted two years after the settlement, Boyce would say only, "I firmly believe the truth in the end always comes out." (Huffington would not comment on the amount of the settlement and said the idea that she cried in the judge's office was "wrong.")

Despite any lingering questions about the source of the original idea, it was Arianna Huffington who had the will and stamina and vision to turn the Huffington Post into a model for the brave new world of fast media and free content. But as the Huffington Post grew, its journalism wasn't the only issue. Huffington was never quite able to follow through on making the money that she said the Huffington Post was going to generate.

PART II

The Huffington Post was not founded to be a business that generated enormous profits. Before it became the 154th most popular Web site in the world, its goal was chiefly political. Following John Kerry's loss in the 2004 presidential election, Huffington and her cofounders, including the investor Ken Lerer and the digital-media savant Jonah Peretti, conspired to create a liberal version of the conservative online juggernaut, the Drudge Report.

By then, Arianna Huffington did not need the money anyway. She had grown up in Athens, the daughter of a journalist, and moved to England with her mother at age 16. Although at first she spoke very little English, she quickly learned and fulfilled her ambition of getting into Cambridge University. She served as the head of the Cambridge Union, the famed debating society, and graduated with a master's degree in economics. From there, in 1980, Huffington moved on to New York City, where she "ingratiated herself into society," says a former colleague, and then met and married Michael Huffington, an oil millionaire. They subsequently moved to Santa Barbara, where he ran for Congress as a Republican and won.

They had two children, Christina and Isabella, but divorced in 1997, the year before Michael publicly came out as bisexual. (He had told Arianna back in 1985, not long after they met, he has said.) Huffington soon shifted her political alignment, abandoning the GOP, and, in 2003, she briefly ran as an independent in a special gubernatorial recall election in California. Arnold Schwarzenegger soon dominated the race—"the hybrid versus the Hummer," Huffington called it—and she withdrew before Election Day.

In 2005, she launched the Huffington Post. As it became a huge success, Huffington, who had little experience in technology or journalism, saw her own brand grow in tandem. But life on the Internet can be cruel. And in a few short years, the site was experiencing a Digital Age version of a midlife crisis. It was reaching 26 million unique visitors per month, an astonishing number, but in the Internet business, sites either grow or shrink. And to grow, the Huffington Post needed more money. The obvious solution was to find a buyer with deep pockets, and in 2011 she found one: Tim Armstrong, a founder of Google's vaunted advertising business, who by then had become chief executive officer of AOL.

Huffington had met Armstrong after hearing him talk at a digital-media conference. They soon struck a deal. According to the internal memorandum about the transaction that Armstrong presented to the AOL board, now available on Smoking Gun, Huffington received around $21 million from the $315 million sale, $3.4 million of which was in options that would vest over a 20-month period. Since she had put none of her own money into the Huffington Post at the start, and owned only a 14 percent stake at the time of the sale, this was a sweet payday.

But Armstrong's deal memorandum also revealed some implicit risks, including the possibility of a class-action compensation claim by the Huffington Post's armada of 18,000 unpaid bloggers. Perhaps the biggest risk, however, was yet to be recognized by Armstrong: the unpredictability of the editor in chief.

Armstrong considered Huffington "a critical element to HuffPost...and her name is a key [intellectual property] asset," he wrote at the time. But his memo to the board also, in retrospect, reveals that Huffington had overshot in the performance projections that she presented to AOL. In 2010, the site generated nearly $31 million in revenue but made a profit of less than $1 million. In 2011, Huffington expected to double revenues, to $60 million, and profit was expected to balloon to $10 million—no doubt helping to justify the purchase price, which was still more than 30 times Huffington Post's projected profits. Armstrong seemed convinced by Huffington's prediction that her business would explode in the coming years. She projected the company's revenue and profit would surge to $115 million and $36 million, respectively, in 2012, and increase to $203 million and $73 million, respectively, in 2015.

That did not happen. In fact, the very year Huffington cut the deal with Armstrong, 2011, turned out to be the publication's only substantially profitable year, "just in case I get hit by a bus today," says one former top editor who left about two years ago, "let me state this for the informal record: In my last year there, we made about $110 million in revenue, give or take, and we weren't profitable."

The Huffington Post's financial challenges owed, in part, to Huffington's lack of experience in managing a business, which resulted in questionable personnel decisions and bad ideas for new ventures, among other problems. Some of her biggest initiatives, such as HuffPost Live, her attempt at real-time Internet broadcasting, flopped, ("it was a disaster," says a former senior executive, who remembers around $12 million being spent on the project. "Nobody was watching it.") Another project, "What's Working," which involved the amplification of positive, sponsor-friendly stories across the newsroom, was widely dismissed.

As for her own role, it seems that Huffington never quite grew comfortable with being essentially a division head at a massive corporation. "I do believe she thinks of herself as a transformational figure," one former editor told me. "She thinks that she is Oprah plus Jesus or something, I don't know. She genuinely in her heart believes that she can change the way journalism is done." Another explains, "The main directive of the Huffington Post, at its core, is not about producing great journalism, but it is about maintaining Arianna Huffington's position in the world." ("Having negative things said about you goes with the terrain when you try and bring change and break new ground," Huffington wrote in an e-mail. "I can't and won't waste my time shadowboxing with these kinds of accusations.")

During the early days of the AOLHuffPost marriage, all seemed well. Soon after the acquisition, according to Huffington Post staffers I spoke with, Armstrong put most of AOL's disparate media properties under Huffington's control, and she became a member of AOL's executive committee. "Everybody at AOL said you could see this weight lifted from Armstrong's shoulders because he's not a media guy," says one former Huffington Post executive.

Armstrong gave Huffington a generous budget, and she went to town with it. She hired successful journalists, such as Tim O'Brien, Tom Zeller, Peter Goodman, and Lisa Belkin from The New York Times. She opened Huffington Post bureaus around the world, including in China, the Middle East, and Paris, for which she hired Anne Sinclair, who was at that time married to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as editorial director. What had been something like 18 separate Huffington Post verticals ballooned to around 6o, the former executive recalls. "She just started spending like crazy, without listening to anybody."

Between Huffington's aggressive spending and missed financial targets, serious tensions soon erupted between her and Armstrong, explains the former executive. "She just doesn't listen well to other people and doesn't acknowledge when she's out of her depth," this person continues. "Everybody on the AOL side hated being in meetings with her. She would berate people. She would take people to task, and they all just got sick of it." In response, Armstrong is said to have started rescheduling executive committee meetings without telling her, so they could meet without her.

Less than a year into the corporate marriage, Huffington was already looking around for a new buyer to peel her company away from AOL. The New York Times reported that she was overheard talking to a Goldman Sachs banker in a bar in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, about how much the HuffPost would fetch. According to the former senior HuffPost executive, Armstrong told Huffington he would let the company go if she could find a buyer willing to pay $1 billion for it. Not surprisingly, no buyer could be found at that price for such an unprofitable business. Meanwhile, Huffington raised eyebrows at AOL by jetting off to give paid speeches—at around $40,000 per speech—sometimes to companies her news organization covered. "She didn't give a shit and didn't think there was a conflict there," the former executive explains.

Eventually, the executive says, to force Huffington to bring down costs, Armstrong installed an AOL executive at HuffPost headquarters. He also took away from her the control of many of the AOL media properties, such as Patch, TechCrunch, and Moviefone. Finally, AOL came up with its "Popemobile strategy," which was intended to edge Huffington out of day-to-day management of the HuffPost by encouraging her to go on trips; on her way out the door, she could just wave "like the Pope to all the people in the newsroom," says the former executive.

But the relationship between Armstrong and Huffington really hit the skids, according to this executive, over a pair of 2012 incidents involving Lauren Kapp, the company's new senior vice president for global strategy. About a month after her arrival, Armstrong blamed Kapp—and by extension, Huffington— for a negative Wall Street Journal article about Patch, a network of online localnews sites owned by AOL, which said that the high cost of running such sites had prompted at least one important investor to rebel against Armstrong's policy of investing in that kind of content. The last straw for Kapp came during a party that AOL and the Huffington Post hosted in June 2012, in Cannes, at a rented house overlooking the Mediterranean. The story goes that one inebriated male AOL executive was horsing around by the pool and accidentally tackled Kapp, who ended up in the water, fully clothed and fully embarrassed. According to the executive, Huffington encouraged Kapp to sue AOL and helped her obtain a high-powered lawyer, much to Armstrong's consternation. AOL quickly settled with Kapp—supposedly for $750,000—and she left the company in July, three months after she started. (Reached by telephone, Kapp declined to comment but did not deny the basic facts of the incident in Cannes.)

Huffington had a tendency to play favorites, a number of former editors told me. It was a habit that led to management miscues that rankled employees. In May 2014, for instance, Huffington announced that Jimmy Soni, the Huffington Post's managing editor, would be moving to New Delhi to run HuffPost India, which was just getting off the ground. "This has been a dream of Jimmy's, as both his parents were born and raised there," Huffington wrote in an e-mail to staffers. "And with India such a huge and important market for us, it's great for HuffPost that Jimmy will be there from the beginning of this effort until the launch."

But Huffington's announcement was somewhat disingenuous. Soni, a former McKinsey consultant, had been hired as Huffington's chief of staff in 2011, after a year as a speechwriter for the mayor of Washington, D.C. Soon thereafter, Huffington named him managing editor, in charge of the site's hundreds of aggregators. He was 26 years old and had no previous journalism experience. "He was completely in over his head," explains the former senior executive. "He was a young kid with so much power. He wasn't a good manager."

In fact, after a rough two-year stint in charge of the newsroom, Soni left the Huffington Post amid allegations that he had aggressively approached a number of young women in the editorial fellows program for dates. Two of them reportedly brought a complaint to the editor overseeing them, and AOL began an internal investigation. Reached by phone, Soni, with whom I serve on a board at Duke, our mutual alma mater, declined to comment about the allegations. "Honestly, I wasn't a perfect manager," he concedes. "On reflection, I don't know that I was ready to be in that position. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot from the experience, and I think I've grown a great deal since." It was time to move on, he says: he and his wife just had their first child and he is writing his second book.

Last year, Huffington further alienated colleagues over "What's Working." Her idea was to publish more positive stories about people and companies. "We want to show that the era of 'if it bleeds, it leads' is over," she wrote her staff, "and start a positive contagion by relentlessly telling the stories of people and communities doing amazing things, overcoming great odds, and facing real challenges with perseverance, creativity, and grace." She announced the idea, in January, during her annual pilgrimage to Davos.

Back in New York, she called a large group of editors and writers into her office. She told them, "What we're going to do from this point forward is we're going to cover all the news, and by that I mean we're not going to just cover the bad news," as one former editor remembers. "We're going to cover the good news. We're not going to just cover what's not working. We're going to cover what's working, and we're going to dominate this. This is going to change the way people do journalism, change the way journalism works in the world."

Jaws dropped. "Understandably," explains the former editor, "when you tell a roomful of people who think of themselves as journalists something like that, everybody was like, What the fuck?, and was rolling their eyes." One senior editor, Emily Peck, did such a poor job of hiding her incredulity, according to the former editor, that Huffington demoted her. (Peck was not demoted, according to another person who was present at the meeting, but did choose to bow out of editorial duties and went back to being a reporter.)

Of course, Huffington was hoping that What's Working would lead to more traffic on the site, and perhaps more advertising dollars. Her theory was that positive stories were more "shareable" on social media than negative ones. Regardless, it didn't work. "We saw page views plummet after we started writing a whole bunch of What's Working stories," recalls the former editor, "because they were terrible stories, typically, that no one wants to read." Not one to easily accept defeat, Huffington then repackaged the idea into What's Working: Profit + Purpose, with sponsorship from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting firm, to offset some of the costs of the new initiative.

As Huffington and Armstrong's relationship disintegrated, she was increasingly cut out of key business decisions, according to a former top executive. By May 2015, Armstrong was close to selling AOL to Verizon. Huffington, it seems, had not been included in any of the negotiations. When the deal was announced on May 12, she was on a flight to Seattle, to attend the Microsoft CEO Summit. She used the fivehour flight as an opportunity to unplug. "Anything happen while I was offline?" she tweeted once she landed.

The ink was barely dry on the deal before financial reporters at Fortune and Recode were speculating that Huffington would want to see the Huffington Post spun off from Verizon and sold to a new buyer. After all, Verizon was buying AOL for its ability to create video content for an array of mobile devices and for its capacity to place digital advertising— not really for the editorial content found on the likes of the Huffington Post. A decade into its life—a veritable century in the Digital Age—the Huffington Post was being treated not as a high-quality news source but as another Web site for click-bait infotainment.

Adding to the intrigue was the fact that she had not yet signed a new contract, theoretically making it easier for her to join forces with a buyer to pry her business loose from Verizon. Shortly after the AOL deal was announced, Recode executive editor Kara Swisher reported that there had been discussions between Axel Springer, the German publisher, and AOL about buying the Huffington Post for $1 billion. Swisher added that "Arianna Huffington is likely to support any deal in which she and her unit get more money to grow globally."

But the $1 billion price tag still seemed outlandish. "What does surprise and stun me are the absurdly high valuations for HuffPost being floated around in the press," one former senior editor e-mailed me at the time. "My only guess is that Arianna [was] feeding those numbers to her friends, which is a canny strategy on her part."

The Huffington Post sale talk died down quickly. And then, on June 18, 2015, it was reported that Huffington had signed a new, four-year contract that would leave her in charge of the Huffington Post, but nevertheless placed her well down in Verizon's extensive and well-delineated organizational chart and pecking order. Huffington spun the news positively. "After all my meetings and conversations with Tim and the Verizon leadership," she wrote in a staff memo, "I am convinced that we will have both the editorial independence and the additional resources that will allow HuffPost to lead the global media platform shift to mobile and video."

In reality, however, while Huffington had been pouring resources into expensive ventures that failed to catch on and steering her newsroom uncertainly between serious journalism and massproduced aggregation, the Huffington Post had missed the great shift from audience development based on searchengine optimization to an equal dependence on social media. The downside to training an armada of young writers to aggregate news stories and capitalize on search traffic is that it is hard to pivot. The HuffPost was being overtaken by other sites that had foreseen the change in strategy, such as BuzzFeed, which was born out of its own skunkworks system, in large part through the tinkering of Jonah Peretti, a HuffPost cofounder. (Ken Lerer, the third HuffPost cofounder, is BuzzFeed's chairman.) Meanwhile, the HuffPost—an omnibus of sorts, with seemingly countless verticals and topic areas—began to look like an outlier in a digital landscape increasingly populated by more specialized sites. Life on the Internet can be cruel, indeed.

There were serious doubts about how long Huffington would last at Verizon. This feeling was reinforced when, five days after Huffington announced that she was staying on, Armstrong held a press conference with his new boss, Marni Walden, Verizon's president of product innovation and new businesses. Walden went out of her way to praise Armstrong. "Over the past six years Tim and his team have done an amazing job at AOL and we're very excited to bring him into the Verizon family," Walden said. "Under Tim's leadership, the company has not only returned to growth but it's also become one of the most forward looking companies in the media technology landscape." Neither Walden nor Armstrong mentioned Arianna Huffington or the Huffington Post. One year later, Huffington would be gone.