Six months after the launch of Huffington Post UK, the British version of her news aggregation and commentary website, Arianna Huffington has announced the extension of her online empire to France. Le Huffington Post, a joint venture with the group that owns the daily newspaper Le Monde, went live yesterday, under the editorial direction of Anne Sinclair, the wife of the disgraced former director of the IMF and erstwhile candidate for the French presidency Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
In an inaugural post explaining “who we are”, Sinclair, the star current affairs presenter and interviewer on the TF1 television channel in the 1980s and 1990s, promises that Le Huff Po will be a site for “debate”, mixing news and comment just as its English and American cousins already do.
Contributors on the site’s first day of activity included Rachida Dati, a former minister of justice and adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, from the left Julien Dray, one of the co-founders of the anti-racist campaigning organisation SOS Racisme and a former spokesman for Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, and the pollster François Miquet-Marty.
That Sinclair would be making her first foray into the French media since her husband’s arrest in New York in May last year has for a while been one of the worst kept secrets in Paris. Incidentally, the story was first broken in October on Rue 89, a news site now owned by the leftish weekly Le Nouvel Observateur with which, one suspects, Le Huff Po will be in direct competition. La guerre commence!