Looking to further expand his growing media presence, Glenn Beck, the conservative talk-show host, has hired a one-time chief executive of the left-leaning Huffington Post to lead his new Web site, The Blaze.

Betsy Morgan, who ran The Huffington Post for two years, ending in 2009, will become president of The Blaze, a four-month-old site intended to curate news articles and opinion pieces of special interest to Mr. Beck’s conservative audience.

He has built that following through aggressive expansion into multiple forms of media, including his high-rated program on the Fox News Channel, a series of best-selling books and numerous personal appearances.

His broadest exposure continues to be in radio, where he ranks as the third-most popular host (after other conservative voices, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity).



Mr. Beck, however, experienced some setbacks in that medium this week. Both WOR radio in New York and WPHT in Philadelphia are dropping the show as of Jan. 17.

Scott Lakefield, the assistant program director of WOR, said ratings for Mr. Beck had fallen off since his early days on the station. “We noticed a downward trend,” Mr. Lakefield said. “The audience was just going elsewhere.”

Christopher Balfe, the president of Mr. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, said that the host remained highly popular on radio nationally, with ratings up 35 percent since the start of 2009. He also said the company would seek new stations in New York and Philadelphia.

The appointment of Ms. Morgan to The Blaze (which Mr. Beck named after the biblical story of Moses and the burning bush) raised some eyebrows at The Huffington Post because of her shift to a polar opposite political point of view. But she said in an interview, “I am a very apolitical person. I’m a business person, who is absolutely fascinated by brands.”

The aim of The Blaze, Ms. Morgan said, is to broaden beyond politically based information to cover other topics of interest to Mr. Beck, whom she called “a widely-known conversationalist on a lot of topics.”

She acknowledged that some of his views had been seen as incendiary and had led to some difficulty in selling to national advertisers. But she said, “Glenn has built for himself quite an enormous brand” and the purpose of The Blaze is to “leverage the huge loyalty of that audience.”