RITA WILSON’S NEW GIG: Big news: the Huffington Post is launching a new vertical today. In the last six months, this is only the 22nd time this has happened.
Technically, there will be three vertical launches. The latest additions to the Huffington Post’s merry band of microsites include verticals for Baby Boomers, gays and weddings. It’s becoming difficult to find a segment of the population that HuffPo has not tried to reach for clickable views.
In any event, the Baby Boomer site (called HuffPost/50) will have Rita Wilson as its editor at large. And how much time does she have to devote to the job?
“That is the beauty of the editor at large position, at least in the way it’s been explained to me,” Wilson told WWD. “I have an editor who is a day-to-day person. And I’m more of an overseer and an editor in the sense that I’m involved in everything that’s going on and that’s going to be on the page. And at the same time I’m not the day-to-day person who is sitting in an office.”
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That person will be Debra Ollivier. Wilson said Arianna Huffington approached her to become an editor at large (Nora Ephron is an editor at large for all of HuffPo as well) and said that a lot of her time would be devoted to thinking about the generation that seems to be “winding up,” instead of previous generations of people in their 50s and 60s who were “winding down” at this point in life. Wilson is 54 (“Remember you weren’t supposed to ever ask a woman her age in our parents’ generation and now we wear it like ‘Woo hoo!’”). She’ll be writing as often as she can for the site.
Wilson has been a columnist for Harper’s Bazaar since 2005 and said she wasn’t aware of the magazine’s upcoming frequency reduction and trim size increase.
“It’s like living large!,” she said, off-the-cuff. “Go Glenda, you’re living large.”