CBSNews.com General Manager to Become Huffington Post's CEO

Posted on October 2, 2007

The New York Times is reporting that Betsy Morgan is leaving her job as the general manager of CBSNews.com to the be the CEO of the Huffington Post. The Huffington Post, aka HuffPo, is the 5th ranked blog on Technorati.

Ms. Morgan will switch from running the Web site for a prominent traditional media organization to running a news Web site that is just over two years old.
"Getting somebody like this to come to our site says a boatload about where the industry is going," said Kenneth Lerer, who has been acting as the chief executive of The Huffington Post and will move up to chairman. He founded the site along with Arianna Huffington, the political commentator.
Ms. Morgan, who is 38 and has an M.B.A. from Harvard, worked in business development at CBS before taking the top post at CBSNews.com in 2005. She said she saw her new role as a business position and not as a journalism position, and added, "It was an opportunity too good to pass up."
"Huffington Post has a lot of smart editors working for it," she said. What the site does well, Ms. Morgan said, is "take a news story and build a community of debate around it."

Jeff Jarvis says, "Betsy will turn Arianna's blogging phenom into a real media business." Besty Morgan's bio on CBSNews.com can be found here. The Huffington Post has been morphing itself into more of a general news this year. When they first started they focused primarily on politics. The progressive political angle persists today but the HuffPo also has categories for business, entertainment and "living now" in addition to their political and media news sections.