Yesterday marked the beginning of a new chapter for HuffPost after the launch day confirming the partnership between the company and Birmingham City University (BCU).
“This partnership has been 16 months in the making,” Dr Sarah Jones- Head of Media at BCU said during the Launch presentation with HuffPost UK, the partnership was confirmed by both sides that this would be a great opportunity for future journalism students and the news organisation themselves.
According to Jimmy Leach- The editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK, Consumers are more engaged than ever with news but 55% feel that their views are not represented in British media today.
HuffPost plans to change this by amplifying the “unheard voices” and not just focusing on the white middle-class reader of many other news companies.
Jimmy Leach continued to present this fact through the statistics of HuffPost as out of the seven million readers, 60% of them were female and 63% of them were aged 25 to 54. HuffPost, however, believes that there is more to news than statistics but to make it something which their readers can relate to.
The launch presentation was then taken over by Jess Brammar- the executive editor of HuffPost UK. Where she discussed further the history of HuffPost and why they had expanded away from London.
Jess Brammar said: “I feel really proud to work for a company that’s not attached to a newspaper” as she spoke about her year and a half with the company and the remarkable stories she has heard from the local people which are also the most popular stories on their platform.
However, the small company has had its challenges. Jimmy Leach said: The problem HuffPost is having right now is as a commercial entity”. Even with the position HuffPost plays they still need to make themselves known as a business it has been noted that they are getting there.
At half five that day the University was privileged with the appearance of Lydia Polgreen- the editor-in-chief of HuffPost in the US. She had joined the company in 2016 and has been in the journalism profession for 20 years.
Lydia’s talk was very inspiring to many budding journalists as she described her job as a lawyer for an immigration officer where she said: “I knew I couldn’t have a job where I was staring at the clock all day, waiting for it to be over”.
The partnership of the university and HuffPost appears to be a promising one with the public looking forward to the content that shall be published.
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