The Huffington Post to launch French edition for Quebec

The Huffington Post has announced that it’s extending its international reach with a second Canada-focused online publication, but this time it will be aimed at French-speaking Quebec.

Le Huffington Post Québec announcement follows six months after the the publication’s first ever international edition was launched in Canada, and it’ll start publishing in early 2012. Quebec is a province in east-central Canada and is the only province whose sole official language is French. It’s Canada’s largest province by area and, with over 8m inhabitants, it’s Canada’s second-largest in terms of population after Ontario.

The Huffington Post now has more than 1.8m unique visitors a month in Canada, 200,000 emanating from the Quebec region alone. The Canada site offers a range of Canada-specific content covering news, business, technology, politics, sport and more, but the Quebec edition won’t be the first French-language version of The Huffington Post, with Le Huffington Post France expected to go live by the end of this year.

The Huffington Post was co-founded by Arianna Huffington in May 2005, and in 2008 the site launched its first local version for Chicago, followed by New York, LA and Denver in 2009, with San Francisco added earlier this year. Following the first international launch in Canada in May 2011, the UK was next up with a local version launched in July.

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In February this year, we reported that AOL had acquired The Huffington Post for over $300m, a deal which saw Huffington become president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL.

The Quebec announcement was made by Huffington at the Women in Film and Television: International Women in Digital Media Summit in Stratford, Ontario. Graham Moysey, General Manager AOL Canada, added:

“We’re excited to roll out Le Huffington Post Québec to extend HuffPost’s reach to all Canadians, both French and English speaking and to deliver a nationwide HuffPost offering to our advertisers. We continue to invest in Canadian editorial teams to deliver engaging content to the Canadian audience.”