AOL To Buy Huffington Post

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday February 7, 2011 @01:45AM from the gobble-gobble-gobble dept.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The La Times reports that AOL has agreed to purchase the Huffington Post for $315 million. The purchase will increase AOL's news portfolio as it competes against Yahoo's growing online news publication profile and Google's news efforts, as well as traditional media companies online. The purchase has yet to acquire government approvals, but the boards of directors of each company and shareholders of the Huffington Post have approved the transaction."

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AOL are still going? by makomk · 2011-02-07 01:47 · Score: 2

AOL are not only still going, but actually buying up websites? Who'd have thought it. Wonder how long until they kill this one off.
1. Re:AOL are still going? by Junta · 2011-02-07 02:10 · Score: 2
  
  I think I see their plan..
  They buy up *all* the websites, then take them off the 'web' and make them accessible only through their 'AOL keyword'.
  
  --
  XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
2. Re:AOL are still going? by commodore6502 · 2011-02-07 02:33 · Score: 2
  
  There's a lot of hate directed at AOL, but people forget it was the first national service to provide a full graphics interface (rather than plain text) in the 1980s.
  Whatever they are now, they used to be a great service (just like Mac used to be a great computer) (j/k). - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgH27p-FAM
  
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  Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
3. Re:AOL are still going? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-02-07 02:33 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Aw someone make a point about a news source you like?
  Finding news that really does not have a 'spin' on it is hard. Fox is right up there with spin. However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it. It is the subtle ones you need to watch out for. They do that by fact stacking and putting opinions after the facts or running them together. Another way is to put the facts that make something look bad at the top of an article and the ones that they dont like so much near the end (as many people only read the first few paragraphs and they know it).
  People say 'reality has a liberal bias'. What big pile of steaming ... (see how I put an opinion in the middle here) The stories will have whatever spin the editor of the story puts on it even if they do not realize they are doing it. 'Blogs' are even worse as they are usually by people who are interested in the story. So they put their own take on it.
  What it comes down to it though, is facts based news does not sell as well. As it is rather dull and boring. "If it bleeds it leads".
  People also like paying for self affirmation. "see I was right and those xyzs were total loon jobs". So while you may not like Fox news there are many out there that like hearing that sort of news. Just as there are many out there who like watching CNN/MSNBC.
  Filter out the opinions on stories (many many many have them). You will see much of the 'news' is just opinion fluffer. The op'ed pieces are easy to filter. It is the ones where they bury it in the story... Do not let others tell you what your opinion is. Make up your own mind with the thing holding your ears apart. That is why I do not watch the newsertainment stations.
4. Re:AOL are still going? by sortius_nod · 2011-02-07 02:49 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Agreed, blatant spin is easier to deal with, bullshit filter gets triggered early. News sources that pretend to be "fair and balanced" (to steal the Fox line) but are really spun to buggery are the hard ones to deal with. I prefer to get my news from multiple sources and make up my own mind.
  Being spoon fed any news is a bad thing.
5. Re:AOL are still going? by tnk1 · 2011-02-07 03:27 · Score: 2
  
  Of course, Time Warner spun off AOL last year, so they won't be killing Time Warner at all.
  As for the rest of it, AOL actually made a (small) profit last year, unlike pretty much every year since 2005 or before.
  AOL still makes money off of Granny, but that's no longer their business model. They're a content and advertising company now, and one of the biggest, if not THE biggest internet advertising business around courtesy of advertising.com.
  Having said that, the CEO has mentioned in the past that, unlike the previous execs, he recognized that AOL still made some good money off of its shrinking subscriber base and that perhaps the company should not just ignore that part of the business any more.
  Its an open question as to whether AOL will kill the Huffington Post, since there is no doubt it has killed other sites. Still, their record is better than Yahoo's Touch of Death(tm) to just about every interesting technology that it has bought as well. And unlike that abortion known as Bebo, the HPost is actually a purchase in line with AOL's current direction as a content provider and ad hub. The price still seems a little on the silly side, but not as batshit insane as the 800 million for Bebo.
  Only time will tell, I suppose.
6. Re:AOL are still going? by DrXym · 2011-02-07 04:00 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Huffington Post's biggest claim to fame in recent years has been as a haven for the anti-vaccination lunacy of retards like Jenny McCarthy, Dana Ullman, and followers of Andrew Wakefield.
  The HP might be fine for political commentary but it is a haven for quacks, woos and snakeoil salesmen peddling all kinds of pseudo scientific new age nonsense. It is as anti-science and anti-reality. Not surprisingly many liberals, especially scientists and academics are as ashamed by what the HP promotes as conservatives are of creationist drool that infects their blogs.
7. Re:AOL are still going? by Remus+Shepherd · 2011-02-07 04:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.
  I'd say that turning a $1 million investment into a $315 million buyout is one hell of an accomplishment.
  
  --
  Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
8. Re:AOL are still going? by Dishevel · 2011-02-07 04:04 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Yawn.....go back to Fox News where you belong....
  Yeah! Everyone knows there is only bias on one side.
  The side you do not like.
  
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  Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
9. Re:AOL are still going? by CaptSlaq · 2011-02-07 04:54 · Score: 2
  
  "The left" "not into authority". I have a new one for an icebreaker comedy routine.
10. Re:AOL are still going? by jc42 · 2011-02-07 05:58 · Score: 2
  
  Finding news that really does not have a 'spin' on it is hard. Fox is right up there with spin. However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it. ...
  This is nothing new. Throughout history, the news "industry" has been run by people with an interest in the news and a strong motive to persuade their readers rather than informing them. Any well-informed person has always tried to hunt down different versions of news stories, with different biases. The pretense that the internet has introduced a new problem here is just that, a pretense. It's just more blatantly obvious, because it's so much easier now to find reports with different biases. It can still be hard, but not nearly as hard as it was in the past.
  We do have one very useful example of a news source that works well as a tool to check out a story from sources with different biases: Google News. Right now, if you go to their Business page, it has the AOL/HuffPost story right at the top. And after the first few links, it has a link with the text "all 1,614 news articles >>". This is their list of all known reports of the topic, ordered by google's "secret" ranking algorithm (which for news mostly means by time stamp ;-).
  Complaining about the biases of news sources goes back as far as we have records of news sources. We haven't ever found a way to produce "unbiased" reporting, and we never will. The best we can do is make all the biases visible, which includes making the source information available. We're not there yet. But so far, the internet has been turning into a better tool for the task than we've had in the past.
  We just need to persuade people to stop bitching about biased news sources, and read some of the alternative news sources that have become so easily available.
  (What other sites do people here know of that make it easy to find multiple versions of news stories with different biases?)
  
  --
  Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
11. Re:AOL are still going? by bonch · 2011-02-07 06:00 · Score: 2
  
  You're getting modded down, obviously by supporters of those sites. However, it's true--DailyKos was infamous for its "screw them" post regarding dead soldiers in Iraq, and since the campaign consultant scandal, Kos posts so little that the site has become a place for user "diaries." Basically, it's just user-submitted articles now that only serve to pat liberals on the back for being liberals.
  Huffington Post was Ariana Huffington's attempt to create a left-wing version of the Drudge Report, right down to the name. It seems like it's just a bunch of celebrity news and pseudo-science. I've never understood why it was ever taken seriously by anyone.
  Right-wingers have their kooky sites too, but then they have some mature, balanced ones like PowerLine. They get their message out, but they're not crazy or hateful about it. I can't speak to what is considered a mature, balanced left-wing site, but I'm sure one is out there. The problem is that liberalism tends to be so fueled by emotion that it drives centrists away, and if a moderate liberal expresses any hint of contradiction with the party line, they get attacked by other liberals.
12. Re:AOL are still going? by Mansing · 2011-02-07 07:22 · Score: 2
  
  Site Information for huffingtonpost.com
  Alexa Traffic Rank: 128 Traffic Rank in US: 31
  Sites Linking In: 40,775
  Site Information for dailykos.com
  Alexa Traffic Rank: 3,775 Traffic Rank in US: 860
  Sites Linking In: 10,523
  Site Information for drudgereport.com
  Alexa Traffic Rank: 430 Traffic Rank in US: 85
  Sites Linking In: 6,977
Re:Wow, who cares? by Chrisq · 2011-02-07 01:48 · Score: 4, Funny

Go die in a fire already. AOL? Huffington Post? Can you get more irrelevant than this?
Well your comment makes a good attempt at it.
If they waited another year by Chrisq · 2011-02-07 01:53 · Score: 3

If they waited another year it would have been Huffington Post buying AOL.
Color me surprised by alvinrod · 2011-02-07 01:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'm surprised that anyone would think the Huffington Post was worth $315 million. I'm even more surprised AOL still has that kind of money.

/rimshot
Will the "unpaid contributors" stick with it? by Chrisq · 2011-02-07 01:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

Correct me if I am wrong but on the news this morning they said that most of the content of the Huffington Post came from unpaid bloggers, usually with a liberal outlook. It seems to me that they might not be as happy working for nothing for AOL as they were with an independent outlet. What are the chances that a good number of them will move elsewhere?
who's taking over whom? by tverbeek · 2011-02-07 02:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

This reminds me of Disney's "take over" of Pixar, in which Pixar effectively took over Disney Animation.

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http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Re:Online media aggregation by jollyreaper · 2011-02-07 02:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

It used to be that people heralded the internet as a death knell to the media conglomerates like ClearChannel and News Corps. Now we're seeing just how simple it is for even a dying internet presence to gobble up prominent venues for discussion, whether of technology (Engadget, TechCrunch) or politics (HuffPo). There's no reason to break out the tin foil hat just yet, but it's surprising how a left-leaning blog such as Huffington Post is not immune to a major league buyout. I'm sure many fans of the blog will defend this acquisition as a huge increase in journalistic capability, and claim that the authors will remain as interested in maintaining an independent politic voice, but only time will tell.
The thing is, people are mobile on the web. Network execs hated the invention of the remote control because they counted on people being too lazy to get up off the couch and change the channel. The last thing they wanted was the ability for people to change channels as quickly as the impulse hit them.
And as far as the web goes, the content producers are just as mobile. If the Huff name dies, everyone can make the jump to a new site, easy-peasy.
As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind. But if none of that was spelled out in a charter and bylaws then there's nothing illegal about it even if it is terribly disappointing. Might be an impetus to put together something with those expressed interests instead.
The thing that surprises me is AOL of all companies. I thought they were in their death throes.

--
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Huff OL by Cartman's+Mom · 2011-02-07 02:38 · Score: 2

The Huffington Post totally belongs on AOL. I believe it’s one of the few “commercially viable” new sites, but I think it’s pretty awful. Misleading teaser headlines, Hollywood gossip obsessed, thin on content. ”You’ve Got News”. Not.
Re:Online media aggregation by nschubach · 2011-02-07 02:48 · Score: 2

For italics, you have to use <em>

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Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Uh by jav1231 · 2011-02-07 03:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

"The purchase will increase AOL's news portfolio"

The Huffington Post is news? I always thought of it as a mega-blog of commentary. Perhaps there belays a shift in our cultural thinking as traditional journalism dies and commentary from biases become the norm and thus the only thing we can call "news."
In other news by Wireless+Joe · 2011-02-07 04:05 · Score: 2

Daily Kos is in talks to be purchased by Adelphia, Crooks and Liars is being taken over by Net Zero, and TalkingPointsMemo will become a part of Earthlink.