The Huffington Post is expanding its live video programming with weekly primetime news hour The HuffPost Show.
The series, which will feature a mixture of news and entertainment segments, will premiere March 27 and will air live every Friday at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on the Huffington Post homepage and HuffPost Live network.
AOL-owned Huffington Post has been airing live video for the last two years via streaming video network HuffPost Live. President and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington says expanding into primetime programming is the next step. “The Huffington Post has always delivered the news with voice, attitude, and point of view,” she says. “Launching a weekly show that offers a satiric look at the week’s top stories was a natural extension of the brand.”
HuffPost Show will be hosted each week by HuffPost Live president and co-founder Roy Sekoff and longtime HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill. A pilot episode shows them transitioning from hard-hitting news segments about the CIA Torture Report to an interview with Web Therapy‘s Lisa Kudrow. Sekoff explains that the hourlong show will look to cover a wide range of topics.
“Huffington Post has always had a dual mission: to entertain and inform,” he says, adding that the show will take a satirical and often irreverent tone when dealing with hot-button issues. “Humor can’t say everything, but it can say some things better.”
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HuffPost Live started in 2012 to provide a video network for the web akin to CNN and now produces eight hours of live programming on weekdays. HuffPost Show, which will shoot in Los Angeles with a dedicated crew of about 15 people, will mark the first time that the network has branched out into primetime programming. As with other HuffPost Live programming, the show will often be cut down into short video segments to be shared across Huffington Post news verticals and AOL properties. Sekoff says the show will be constructed to be clippable.
“You can watch the replay of the whole show and have the lean-back experience,” he says. “But we want the most memorable moment to drive conversation leading into the next week.”
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Sekoff admits that airing a weekly show makes it more difficult to stay on top of breaking news. That’s why HuffPost Show will have what he calls a “rapid-response team” that will respond to news as it is happening throughout the week. That response might come in the form of a six-second Vine, 140 character tweet or two-minute YouTube video, he explains. “It creates a two-way interaction with our audience that I don’t think others in the space have,” he says. “It creates this pinwheel of content that feeds into the mothership on Friday night.”
HuffPost Show premieres at an inflection point for the satirical TV news genre. Jon Stewart has announced his departure from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert aired the last episode of The Colbert Report in December ahead of his jump to late night. Meanwhile, John Oliver dominates Monday morning conversations with HBO’s Last Week Tonight, which airs on Sunday nights.
Sekoff says he wants the show to become part of that weekly media diet. “We’d like to join the party.”
Watch a clip for HuffPost Show below.
