How will the Huffington Post affect the Gulf’s media landscape? We’ll find out early next year. (image source: http://www.aim.org)

Being in the Middle East’s media sector can often feel like waiting for a bus. You can wait for years for a new launch (post-2008 in any case) and then all of a sudden you have two of the world’s largest news portals announcing expansion plans. First we had Buzzfeed, and now we have the Huffington Post. The local site Doha News broke the story earlier this month. According to the piece, the site will be partnered by the former director general of the Al Jazeera Media Network Wadah Khanfar and his media firm Integral Media Strategies.

The site will be in Arabic and will launch early next year. HuffPost Arabi, as it will be known, will be based in London. HuffPo founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington is quoted by Doha News as saying the site would “bring more Arab voices into the conversation and deepen the world’s understanding of life in the Arab world, from its problems to its accomplishments to its untapped potential.”

The site will include a combination of aggregation, blog posts from a wide variety of sources and original reporting from HuffPo reporters and Khanfar’s team.

Launched in 2005, the original Huffington Post redefined online media by working with bloggers to aggregate news. The site was the first online news portal to win a Pulitzer and was sold in 2011 for 315 million dollars to AOL. Besides English, the Huffington Post is published in French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German, Portuguese and Korean.

However, how will the Arabic be received? Firstly, Khanfar was one of the driving forces behind the success of Al Jazeera. However, with him at the helm HuffPost Arabi is likely to be persona non grata in many of the Gulf states due Al Jazeera’s implied support for Islamist groups and perceived interference in the internal politics of governments across the region.

In addition, much of the dialogue that the Huffington Post is looking to encourage in the region can already be found online on social media. With its base in London, five thousand kilometers from the Gulf, how will the HuffPost Arabi be able to distinguish itself in a crowded media landscape that is government controlled? I can’t wait to find out.