Apocalypse 41: AOL Buys Huffington Post

Posted: February 7th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Apocalypse Series, Journalism, Technology | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

Tim Armstrong’s game to make AOL a content company continues today with his $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post. Deal details are here, but the key points are: the new Huffington Post Media Group will include HuffPo as well as AOL’s content sites, and Arianna Huffington will be its editor-in-chief.

I’ve been reasonably patient and benefit-of-the-doubt-giving about the new AOL, but this strikes me as a terrible idea. First, there’s the gap between how the two companies see ‘content.’ For all the heat it takes on the grounds that it doesn’t pay its writers (and that heat is deserved), the HuffPo is very much a place that believes there’s value to a publisher in originalreporting. The front page may still read like the liberal answer to Drudge that its founders had in mind, but of late, the site has made major expansions into more serious coverage, and I increasingly run into HuffPo reporters who are doing gumshoe work. It is much more than an aggregator with great SEO managers, though it is that too.

AOL when Tim Armstrong first took it over promised to be that, hiring a number of high-profile journalists from collapsing newspapers to work on a number of smart blogs, and even recruiting stringers as foreign correspondents. But in the last few months, the strategy has shifted. This presentation of AOL’s new metrics for success is pessimistic and unimaginative, a vision of digital media seems stuck in the noisy, SEO-obsessed world of five years ago. It’s certainly not a vision that’s compatible with the kind of place that HuffPo has grown up to be, nor with some of the more interesting elements of AOL’s current content stable. No surprise, then, that those elements are the first to be thrown overboard.

Second, the new ‘AOL way’ is all about mass appeal, and, as everyone knows, the Huffington Post is partisan project. I am not sure what is harder to imagine: that all of AOL’s platforms could conform to Ariana Huffington’s worldview, or that the Huffington Post could suddenly shift center, in the way that Armstrong and Huffington promised when talking about the deal to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher.

Actually, the whole Swisher interview is worth watching, because it highlights these two culture clashes–on politics and on reporting–that make me skeptical of the deal: listening to Ariana and then Armstrong, it seems as though they are talking about separate mergers. AOL. has been down the dangerous route of a merger with a very different culture before, and it had disastrous consequences. It’s a shame it seems to be making the same mistake twice.


3 Comments on “Apocalypse 41: AOL Buys Huffington Post”

  1. 1 AOL buys Huffington Post said at 6:44 pm on February 7th, 2011:

    […] This article is cross-posted from Instant Cappuccino. […]

  2. 2 bjkeefe said at 9:19 am on February 8th, 2011:

    Comment over at the other site (in the moderation queue, it says).

    For future reference, do you prefer comments here or there, when you cross-post?

  3. 3 bjkeefe said at 11:32 am on February 8th, 2011:

    Comment fragmentation is annoying, isn’t it? Not that I get tons of comments in any case, but half of them are posted under the autofeed of my blog into Facebook. Makes me think some opportunities for discussion are being missed.

    That’d be a killer app — a comment plug-in that automatically cross-posted comments.

    (Or maybe not. Could be kind of confusing for commenters on the respective sites once it got past a few, especially if there already were conversations started in the separate locations.)


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