Maybe the Internet does pay off monetarily for someone besides Facebook or Google. Like Ariana Huffington and other investors in the Huffington Post, which AOL bought for $315 million cash a couple of days ago. While no one knows if the deal will pay off for a somewhat flailing AOL, there’s more to it than just just another online acquisition.
For one thing, will Huffington, now elevated to leading AOL’s news division, alienate potential advertisers with her decidedly liberal political views? Huffington, who founded HuffPo as an alternative the more conservative Drudge Report, says that only 15 percent of the site is dedicated to politics, with the rest featuring blogs and items on celebrities, culture, books and entertainment.
For another, what will this mean for already downtrodden journalists? The LA Times’ Tim Rutten writes.: “The merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy … The fact is that AOL and the Huffington Post simply recapitulate in the new media many of the worst abuses of the old economy’s industrial capitalism — the sweatshop, the speedup and piecework; huge profits for the owners; desperation, drudgery and exploitation for the workers. No child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it…”
And Wall Street doesn’t like the deal, either, with AOL’s stock falling in a too-weird-to-be-a-coincidence $315 million since the merger was announced. Others wonder how the site will fare with many of the Huffington Post tech and content team departing.
And, finally, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank asks if Arianna Huffington has sold out progressivism to mainstream media. His answer is that nothing Ms. Huffington does should be surprising.
One other curious and curiouser piece of media news: Keith Olbermann’s announcement he is moving his schtick to Current TV – which only select liberals have ever heard of, but is a cable network co-founded by Al Gore that Current-ly reaches 60 million homes in the U.S. Olbermann, you might remember, left his volatile reign at MSNBC last month, and has a history of wearing out his welcome at other anchor desks.
