Betsy Morgan was at the helm of left-leaning website Huffington Post from 2007 to 2009, which is causing comment about her new gig. She will be tacking hard right to run the bridge at Glenn Beck’s youthful website The Blaze.
The website was designed to provide news and information to Beck’s wide audience, which he reels in via his multi-faceted media presence which includes radio, his Fox News Channel program, books and notably last year, a major public event on the Mall in Washington DC.
According to reports, Morgan says the left-to-right shift is not a big deal to her because she is essentially apolitical. She says instead that she is interested in the business and the brand. And the Beck brand brings with it an extremely loyal audience.
Her plan is to use that strong loyalty to build The Blaze, and to do so by engaging Beck’s audience on multiple levels. In terms of where The Blaze is at the moment, Morgan notes that it is not unlike what she found when she signed on at Huffington back in 2007.
Morgan told Forbes, “I think what’s really interesting to me about this audience and this brand, and it’s very different, obviously, than the one Arianna and I built, but it’s a very substantial community, and it’s a community that interacts with each other and is social. And that community exists because of Glenn and what he’s on on radio, on TV, in print. He’s built an amazing multimedia empire in a short amount of time. What’s intriguing to me from a business perspective is bringing that community together online.”
RBR-TVBR observation: Whatever your opinion of Beck, there is no question that he leaves no stone unturned in his quest for media ubiquity, and in advertising terminology, each impression he makes in any given medium helps fuel further impressions in all the others. Even though traditional media will be around for awhile yet, the internet is rapidly expanding its piece of the pie, and a strong Beck presence there is at once its own reward, and at the same time it helps keep the portion size of his other pie pieces robust.
