Grupo Abril | Ariana Oba!

Source: Jornal O Globo.

SÃO PAULO – Three days after announcing a partnership to publish a Portuguese language version of the Huffington Post, the Abril Group has decided on a title for the Brazilian version and named an editor in chief of the nucleus of local content.

In a communiqué released this Thursday, the company said the local edition will be known as the Brasil Post, and that Ricardo Anderáos will edit the new project. According to Abril, the Brasil Post will launch in early December. In an initial stage, ten journalists will be hired specifically to produce content for the portal, which will operate out of Abril headquarters in Pinheiros, in São Paulo. Since last year, Anderáos has served as director of social media and transmedia at the group, which he joined  in 2011 at the invitation of the Directorate of Digital Media of MTV Brasil.

Abril has since given up on MTV.

 Prior to that, he was director of Online Business at the Bandeirantes Group, after having worked for dailies such as the Folha de S. Paulo, the Estado de S. Paulo, the Jornal da Tarde, Carta Capital, the free paper Metro Radio Eldorado and BandNews FM. He was the first Webmaster of the Universo Online group — UOL.

The Huffington Post has 47 million unique visits in the U.S. and 77 million in the entire world — according to a comScore study from May 2013 — with more than 8 million comments posted per month. The site has more than 50,000 bloggers — from politicians to students and celebrities — who contribute in real time to the portal.

Interesting.

Along with the Huff Po’s reputation for independence, its Brazilian partners foresee that it will contribute to the other 40 Web sites owned by Abril. Currently, the Brasil Post has sections on politics, entertainment, technology, and lifestyle, along with a section called “voices,” segmented to appeal to different groups of readers.

Abril is ambitious in its plans to pipe content down a technologically sophisticated content pipeline that depends a great deal on the growth of squinting at small screens. (I should disclose the fact that I murdered my Blackberry several years ago.)

The Brazilian edition will join 40 editorial sites and nearly 30 titles for tablets that Abril already operates.The group is also dependening on applications for tablets and smart phones that rank in the top ten downloads — as many as 8 million. To Fábio Barbosa, “the partnership will allow Abril to accelerate its entry into new business models in order to reach other segments of customers in Brazil, as HuffPo has done with partners around the world. “

As the Blog do Lino notes, the ideological frenzy and information warfare carried out by a handful of Abril’s political and business titles is not expected to stand in the way.

This creates an apparent paradox, if you are sufficiently unaware that you are no longer in Kansas any more.

It is no secret that the Huffington has strong ties to U.S. Democrats and that, by American standards, is considered an online publication of the Left.

Abril,  meanwhile, if it operated in the States, would align itself with Fox News and the like. and now, this Monday afternoon, the HuffPo and Abril accounced a deal to launch a Brazilian version of the site founded by Ariana Huffington in May 2005.

Ariana Huffington is an abomination, IMHO.