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Huffington Post, Berggruen Institute launching new global affairs website

The Huffington Post in conjunction with the Berggruen Institute on Governance have announced plans to launch a new online publication, The World Post, that “aspires to be the one publication where the whole world meets,” and which will have a highly distinguished list of contributors.

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | January 9, 2014

The Guardian reported that the website’s writers will include Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. The website is set to launch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland later this month.

According to the press announcement, The World Post will “deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; it will also bring the best minds and most authoritative voices together to make sense of events from a global, rather than national perspective.”

In addition to covering the crises of governance that are the focus of the Berggruen Institute, the statement said The World Post “will also address the future of work, lifestyle, family, technology, business, health, media, and the environment. It will additionally cover art, literature and the religious imagination, in short, reflecting on the world in which we live.”

Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, will serve as the founding Editor-in-Chief of The World Post, and Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor of the Huffington Post, will serve as the Executive Editor. Goodman was previously the National Economics Correspondent of The New York Times and Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Post.

The World Post’s 11-member editorial board was also unveiled and includes Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, eBay Founder and Chairman Pierre Omidyar, and Walter Isaacson, the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute (and biographer of Steve Jobs).

In an interview with The Guardian, Nicolas Berggruen stressed that the new venture would not just be a platform for the 1 percent. In the same article, Huffington concurred: “You can have all those heads of state and major business people, etcetera etcetera, writing right next to an unemployed man from Spain, a student from Brazil. The great heart of HuffPo is no hierarchy.”

Both Huffington and Berggruen said that the website would be run for profit.

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