Everybody panic! Huffington Post is coming to Canada and has so far hired one person

Everybody panic! Huffington Post is coming to Canada and has so far hired one person

A bit of inside baseball news about the wild, sometimes incestuous world that is Toronto media: Globeandmail.com editor Kenny Yum has been snapped up by AOL Canada and is charged with overseeing the launch of Huffington Post Canada this spring. Wait, what? Huffington Post is coming to Canada? Like, now!?! Can’t we get a CRTC regulation to prevent this? Sure, we’ve yelled and screamed about the regulator’s willingness to let private companies establish a choke hold on the Internet, but this is important—Canada’s domestic blogging industry needs protection!

Marketing Magazine has the story:

U.S.-based AOL recently acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million. While Yum wouldn’t give specifics on Huffington’s Canadian content offerings, he said it will be a continuation of its American brand that will be adjusted to “the peculiarities of what makes a Canadian reader different than a U.S. reader… We’d like some Canadian flavour, of course, as we adapt to this market.”

Huffington Post is a competitor to The New York Times, CNN and big-name online portals in the U.S., and Yum said Huffington Post Canada will play a similar role here.

So watch out, CBC and globeandmail.com, because HuffPo is coming after us all! Of course, we’ll look forward to the next few years of Canadian media angst over this. If history repeats itself, Huffington Post Canada bloggers are destined to ignore questions about ethics in reporting, complain about being unpaid and then file a class-action lawsuit about it. For those of us who like to write about those times the media becomes the news, this is just going to get better (although it seems Eye Weekly The Grid may have beaten HuffPo to the punch).

Seasoned digital journalist to oversee Huffington’s Canadian launch [MarketingMag.com]