Arianna Huffington sent an email to staff late last night (and subsequently published a few hours later on Gawker) announcing that “Rachel Sklar has decided to leave HuffPost.” Sklar is a senior contributing editor at Huffington Post and editor of “Eat the Press,” part of the site’s media page.
Sklar tells TVNewser she expects to officially leave “in the week or so following the election,” as she finishes other HuffPost assignments. “I want to wind down properly — I have a bunch of pet projects that I dropped the ball on thanks to the schedule of chasing the news cycle,” she says. “I’m hoping to do a few of those justice on my way out.”
She says she will continue blogging for HuffPost after officially leaving. “I love HuffPo and can’t imagine not having it as a place to park my random musings,” she says. “I’m actually sort of looking forward to doing stuff for the other sections, which I always mean to do and never have time to — I’m excited for the nascent Books section, and honestly I keep wanting to do things for Style and Living — Arianna wants me to do something on my “fashion finds” at H+M and Forever 21. So yeah, expect to see me haunting the place. But I am excited to haunt some other places as well.”
We asked if there was a tipping point — like in August, when a post she had written about MSNBC was published on Poynter rather than Huffington Post because it was “not congruent with HuffPost’s editorial position.”
“The thing about the Poynter post was that it was completely transparent — it was all in the little disclosure,” she says. “I understood where Arianna was coming from — and I agree with her rejection of the automatic left-right paradigm, the auto-balance thing you see everywhere that has become increasingly dopey as there are more and more obvious merit-based reasons for falling on one side or the other (well, more one side).”
But Sklar has had some dust-ups with one of the left’s biggest stars, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, during her time at HuffPost. Olbermann wrote he was “mildly alarmed” by her, and Sklar has named Olbermann “worst person in the world” and has written a critique of an Olbermann comment that forced an on-air apology by the MSNBC anchor.
As for the August post, Huffington did allow it to be posted elsewhere. “In that case though I really felt strongly that I had something and wanted to get it out there as part of the canon,” she says. “But honestly, that was months ago — we had the conventions since then, which were amazing and amazing to be part of with HuffPo, and it’s been great since then.”