Slashdot Mirror
AOL Picking Up Journalists Shed By Conventional Media
Hugh Pickens writes "David Weir writes on Bnet that the thousands of journalists being let go from newspapers, magazines, and television networks have increasingly been showing up on AOL's payroll — over 1,500 in the last eighteen months — a number AOL expects to double or even triple over the coming year. 'Over time, talent is a fixed cost,' says Marty Moe, Senior Vice-President of AOL Media. 'You can syndicate it, distribute it as you scale. Furthermore, we are already the largest branded content company in the US, with an audience of 75 million domestic uniques. At our size, we can leverage the cost of our publishing and content management systems along with the talent and make the whole thing do-able on an advertising model.' Weir writes that AOL's turnaround started three years ago via the acquisition of Weblogs, Inc., and its set of branded verticals, including Engadget in technology, Autoblog covering the auto industry, and Joystiq covering gaming."
You could've just said "niche blogs". What makes them "branded" verticals, anyway? It's not like "Autoblog" is one of the news industry's most sought-after trademark endorsements.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I wish I was you. Really.
Give a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. (Terry Pratchett)
They don't call those guys "human resources" for nothing! People (i.e., "the talent") are a resource to be acquired, used up and disposed of as cheaply and as profitably as possible. This story fits right in as a bookend to yesterday's story about how the Rupert Murdoch media empire is gonna start charging for all their websites because "content isn't free". Hmmm....
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
...now that I found out that I'm still patronizing AOL in some form. Yes, I used to have AOL. For shame.
There have been several stories on Slashdot recently about the demise of newspapers. Commentary from blogs and elsewhere is fine, but somebody needs to be gathering the primary data. If AOL are willing to pick up the slack on this, I might just start to forgive them for all those damn floppy disks in the late 90s.
They talk about paying for it with syndication and distribution; I wonder if this model can be used to pay for proper long-term investigative journalism, the kind of stuff that is vital to democracy.
Break out your buzzword bingo cards everyone, everyone's a winner!
So far, they mostly demand entertainment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think this is pretty big news.
It seems just like when Virgin Atlanic airlines took advantage of complacent and poorly managed (at the top) Pan Am Airlines and cherry picted talent. Look who is around now. I think we may finally be seeing the shift in media from print to web for newspapers. It is a big ship and it takes time. Industries reinvent themselves, sometimes as other companies.
AOL's acquisition of these well-trafficked "blogs" was a turnaround alright. It was a turnaround for the blogs. They all started to suck.
It's almost guaranteed that if you see the AOL logo at the bottom of a blog, it's going to be a maze of links you think head off to references, stories, and other places of interest, but instead link back to other pages on the blog itself. Imagine slashdot if the link to TFA was just a link back to the dupe from three days ago, and you've got every AOL blog out there.
It's a shame, 'cause some of them were pretty good before the takeover.
I just won the web economy bullshit bingo! What I will do with the money I won?
Syndicate with talented fixed-cost do-able domestic model uniques, to leverage and scale my verticals, until acquisition for branding, and then reach the turnaround, of course!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
>Does no one speak in clear plain language anymore?
No, we emit facetime dialog that has high legibility quotiants.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
They will push to have at least one top reporter in each city in which a second or even third newspaper shut down. For example, I am here in Colorado. Rocky Mountain News closed earlier due to the bad management that was occurring. Basically, it ran the paper into the ground esp. with their handling of the internet (ugly step child). OTH, AOL has far far more of an idea of how to handle the internet. They could easily hire one or more of the RMN top reporters and re-start it. At this time, the main paper that remains, the Denver Post, is HORRIBLY ran. It has an online editor, Demetria Gallegos, who came from TV. Dgallegos gets on-line and will delete posts or ban anybody that disagrees with her personal POV. It is unlikely that DP will get their act together because all of their top ppl view the net as an enemy, not the future.
AOL, you can help speed things up. NewsPapers need to die.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A world where AOL is relevant to the internet? It's a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!
Yeah, maybe they could call it pathfinder.com, and use Time Warner's ex-employees to eat TW's lunch for dumping them and AOL. Payback time baby!