The Huffington Post has launched its Canadian edition, the latest U.S. digital media company to use Canada as an international testing ground.
The news aggregation company Huffington Post Canada took the wraps off a new homepage dedicated to Canadian news and politics, with contributions from prominent Canadians such as David Suzuki and Elizabeth May.
Plans for the launch emerged in April, when the publication began hiring in Toronto. It’s the first step in a series of new editions planned for international markets. The HuffPo, as it is often called, will launch a U.K. version on July 7 and has hired 130 journalists there in the past few months. Founder Arianna Huffington will travel to Brazil at the beginning of September to finalize plans for a Brazilian edition as well.
“I have been wanting to launch in Canada for a while,” Ms. Huffington said in an interview on Thursday.
In February, AOL bought The Huffington Post in a $315-million (U.S.) deal, and installed Ms. Huffington as the president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group division. That merger gave the site the capital and an established base of Canadian staff to expand here.
The decision to come to Canada was fuelled too by the large Canadian audience that already existed for the U.S. edition, which in the past year has attracted on average 1.3 million Canadian unique visitors, according to Comscore, which measures Web traffic.
“We had a constituency that was interested in more, and now being able to superserve it with Canadian stories and Canadian bloggers is a really exciting prospect,” Ms. Huffington said.
The Canadian expansion comes just one day after Postmedia Network Canada Corp. announced that it is testing a metered pay model for two of its newspapers’ websites, with plans to charge for online content across Canada in the future. Ms. Huffington, whose site is known for drawing content from other sources and linking to free articles to boost traffic and sell advertising, said that such pay walls being put up by traditional news sites such as The New York Times are good for her publication.
Mary McGuire, a professor of multimedia journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, said that pay walls could certainly change the news environment. “I don’t see people paying, when there’s a lot that’s available for free,” she said. “But journalism done by paid reporters, if that becomes hidden by pay walls, that also changes the model for an aggregation site like Huffington Post.”
The site has continued its past practice of recruiting big-name contributors, including politicians, activists, celebrities and business leaders. On Thursday it announced that Indigo Books & Music Inc. chief executive officer Heather Reisman would act as editor at large for Canada. (Writer and film director Nora Ephron holds the post in the U.S.)
The relationship could also mean promotional partnerships with Indigo on the site, Ms. Huffington said. Bank of Nova Scotia came on board as advertising partner for the Canadian launch.
Currently the AOL Canada team and the Huffington Post Canada team have merged, with about 24 staff running the sites. Editors were brought in from New York to flesh out the Canadian team and support the launch. The publication will hire two or three more people for the Canadian team, and evaluate other staffing needs as operations continue.
The launch was not without glitches. A story about National Bank of Canada earnings featured a photograph of the Bank of Canada headquarters. In the early afternoon, the largest headline on the site read “Cyber Fail” and, ironically, showed an error message rather than linking to a story.
