HuffPost Live

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

~ the goodbye ~

huffpost live sat in the part of the us media stack i was not watching. by 2012 my streaming diet was youtube for clips and twitch for the game side. huffpost live was a different shape from either. it was an eight-hour daily live newsroom, running on a browser page inside the huffington post site, with a shifting rotation of hosts sitting in a new york studio talking to skype guests over a video wall. the pitch inside aol was that this was the format television news would look like once cable finished losing the under-forty audience.

arianna huffington announced the project in february 2012 as a followup to the aol acquisition of huffpost. roy sekoff, the huffpost founding editor, co-created the show system with gabriel lewis on the aol studios side. the launch happened on 13 august 2012 with ten hosts on the board. josh zepps and marc lamont hill were among the on-camera names during that opening year, alongside alyona minkovski on the daytime side. programming ran eight hours live from a new york studio plus four hours from los angeles, weekdays only. by mid-2013 the network was pulling around 27 million monthly video views.

still, the model had a real editorial argument behind it. the guest system used skype and google+ hangouts to pull in remote panelists from anywhere on short notice. that piece worked and got copied by other outlets. the live-streaming category itself was about to move under everyone. twitter bought periscope in january 2015 after meerkat had already gone public a month earlier. facebook live launched to public users in january 2016. by then the case for a stand-alone browser-based live newsroom was closing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what really happened ~

on 8 january 2016 huffington posted a memo to staff saying live programming would be scaled back to focus on more shareable video and video content. the wording put it as a pivot rather than a shutdown. what it meant in practice was that live hours were cut and staff were reassigned or let go. the show slots were replaced by reruns and short celebrity interview segments. the final live segment aired on 25 march 2016. the domain kept running the archive for a while after that but no new live programming shipped.

~ the timing ~

huffpost live came out of aol just as aol itself was being wound into verizon. the may 2015 verizon acquisition of aol changed the parent-company calculus without immediately changing the daily programming. by the time the shutdown was announced eight months later, the surviving programming budget was already being redirected toward the yahoo integration path that would eventually produce oath and then verizon media, before apollo global bought the whole thing back out as yahoo again. huffpost live was a piece of aol-programming spend that had a hard time surviving that chain of ownership.

~ what got buried with it ~

the live-streaming pattern huffpost live had built its brand on kept going, just under different brand names. facebook live and instagram live absorbed most of the same demand, with twitch news channels picking up the rest a couple of years on. the remote-guest-over-video panel that huffpost live had normalized for daily news video became the standard covid-era cable format five years later. the network of hosts scattered. josh zepps started uncommon knowledge on the podcast side while marc lamont hill kept a cable news chair. the live newsroom-in-a-browser format the show had shipped did not really come back.

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