Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have joined South Africa, Australia, and Germany in HuffPost's international graveyard.
Rabat – French-language online news outlet HuffPost Maghreb announced on Wednesday, December 3, that it will no longer publish local content from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
HuffPost Maghreb is part of the American news and opinion website HuffPost, formerly the Huffington Post, and the third Francophone branch of the company.
HuffPost first touched down in North Africa in 2013, beginning in Tunisia and adding a Moroccan branch the following year.
Abdelmalek Alaoui, CEO of HuffPost Maghreb and founder of the Moroccan branch, cited “strategic reasons” for the website’s closure in an announcement on Twitter. No further details have been released.
Suite aux nombreuses questions et demandes reçues, je partage ce communiqué pour annoncer que le Huffpost Maghreb, c’est terminé aujourd’hui…merci aux équipes et la famille Huffpost , et à bientôt pour de nouvelles aventures! pic.twitter.com/8Ve2PeTHVi
— Abdelmalek Alaoui (@Abdelmalekalaou) December 3, 2019
Several major branches of the outlet have shut down since 2018. HuffPost offices have already closed in South Africa, Australia, and Germany.
Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti launched the Huffington Post on May 9, 2005, as a political and social commentary outlet.
In 2011, AOL acquired the outlet for $315 million. HuffPost now belongs to Verizon Communications after the telecommunications conglomerate purchased AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion.
HuffPost won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, the first commercially run US digital media enterprise to do so.
Despite being a global company with a powerful parent company, HuffPost is not immune to financial setbacks. At the beginning of 2019, HuffPost laid off 7% of its staff and completely eliminated its opinion and health sections.
BuzzFeed, a major American news and entertainment website, also laid off 15% of its employees in early 2019. Mic, Refinery29, and other online publications also issued cuts.
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