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 original reporting. 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.
Interesting thoughts.
I share some of your dubiousness about this, although I do, for some reason in this case, have the gut feeling that it could be a good thing for two strong-willed people to wrestle over the direction of the enterprise. Sometimes tension can be a creative force.
I dispute to some degree that notion that the HuffPo is “[a] partisan project.” Yes, they do have the image in a lot of minds of a big lefty site, but it’s worth keeping in mind two things. First, the majority of their page views are for their titillating and other decidedly non-political posts. (IIRC, I dug up a link to support this back when you and I were discussing HuffPo in the Bhtv forums.) Second, there are a fair number of contributors who are not liberals. Perhaps they don’t have a huge roster of red-meat-tossing conservatives, but it does seem to me that there is at least no shortage of centrists.
The first of the above certainly seems to fit with your depiction of AOL as being “all about mass appeal.”
To the second, I’d say that even if HuffPo averages out to a left-leaning stance, so what? The first thing I thought when I was told yesterday (when there was no computer at hand to verify), “I think I heard that AOL bought HuffPo,” was “no way would a determined fence-straddler like AOL have the guts to be tainted (in the minds of the usual howlers about ‘the liberal media’) by associating itself with the HuffPo’s image.” I was delighted to find out I was wrong. If AOL-HuffPo becomes known as a left-leaning site, that would be fine — it’s not as though we don’t have a large number of big right-leaning sites already. Maybe it’ll become the online analog to MSNBC trying to push back against Fox.