When media titan Arianna Huffington stepped down from the Huffington Post, she left some pretty big shoes to fill. Luckily for her, there was Lydia Polgreen.
In 2016, Polgreen was named editor-in-chief of the news site after serving as editorial director and masthead editor at the the New York Times.
Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in West Africa, Polgreen remembers feeling detached from history while growing up. Now, she’s eager to connect the world through the power of storytelling. “I can’t help but be excited about the possibility of telling stories of the world to the world,” she recalls.
Polgreen hopes to broaden the Huffington Post’s audience base. “I see us as fundamentally representing the ordinary people anywhere in the world who feel that the game is rigged; that the deck is stacked against them; who feel that the house always wins,” she explained during an interview with CNN.
Her role at the Huffington Post is far from Polgreen’s first major success in journalism. In 2006, she won a prestigious Polk Award her hard hitting reporting on Darfur. She also earned other major awards, including the Overseas Press Club award and Livingston Award for International Reporting. A prolific social media user, Politico called her “one of Twitter’s most prolific commentators on the state of the media in the digital age.”
You can follow Polgreen’s tweets on everything from dogs to politics @lpolgreen.
