HuffPost Arabi

» see huffpostarabi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I do not read Arabic, so this site was never going to be mine whatever it published. The part that sits close is geographic rather than linguistic: half of it was edited out of the largest city in my own country, and I would not have known that at the time, or known it existed at all. Language is a border that does not care how near the desk is.

HuffPost Arabi opened on 27 July 2015 with the word Marhaba and an unusual brief. Every other international edition the Huffington Post had built was aimed at a country. This one was aimed at a language, and Arianna Huffington's launch post set the target at 377 million people across twenty two countries, running from Mauritania to Oman. The newsroom was in none of them. It ran from London and Istanbul, and Huffington wrote that this was deliberate, because avoiding any kind of censorship and control was absolutely key to the coverage.

The local half of the venture was Integral Media Strategies, a London-registered company headed by Wadah Khanfar, who had run Al Jazeera as director-general until 2011. The editor-in-chief was Anas Foda, previously of MBC and a co-founder of Al-Arabiya's website. Putting the former head of Al Jazeera in charge of an Arabic edition of an American liberal news brand was the decision that defined the site while it lived, and it shaped how its ending got reported.

Louise Roug, HuffPost's international director, posted the notice on 30 March 2018: as of today at 11:59 pm ET, we will officially cease publication of HuffPost Arabi. The reason given was a mutual decision by HuffPost and Integral Media Strategies as both organizations continued to reassess how and where each could best serve audiences in the region. No financial figure and no editorial dispute were named.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the year it got difficult ~

June 2017 is when the ground moved under it. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut relations with Qatar and began a blockade, and Al Jazeera, the Qatari state broadcaster Khanfar had run, was named in their grievances. HuffPost Arabi was blocked in Egypt, one of the four. When the closure came, UAE-based and Saudi-owned outlets covered it with Khanfar in the headline rather than HuffPost: Al Arabiya's version was that the Huffington Post had cut its agreement with a former Al Jazeera chief.

Critics aligned with those governments had accused the site of sympathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood, banned in several Gulf states. HuffPost never endorsed that account, and its own statement named no politics at all. What can be said without picking a side is narrower and still true: the site launched into one Middle East and closed into a different one, thirty two months later.

~ the wave it closed in ~

It was not a single decision about one edition. Verizon bought AOL in June 2015, weeks before HuffPost Arabi launched, and folded HuffPost into Oath in June 2017. The German edition shut in March 2018, the same month as the Arabic one. The South African partnership ended that July. After BuzzFeed bought HuffPost, India and Brazil closed in November 2020 and Canada in March 2021.

What was dying was the international-editions model itself. A joint venture with a local partner in every market was how the Huffington Post reached fourteen of them, and it was an expensive way to run newsrooms once the parent company had become something passed between telecom owners.

~ what the address says now ~

The domain huffpostarabi.com still answers. What it returns is a single white box on a gray page: this domain is privately held, this domain name is currently inactive. Somebody is paying to hold it and declining to say why. The old subdomain arabi.huffingtonpost.com does not resolve at all, which is the more honest of the two endings.

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