It is official — AOL has gone liberal.
Via the old Gray Lady:
The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.
The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and were expected to announce the deal Monday morning. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.
The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.
Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.
The deal has the potential to create an enterprise that could reach more than 100 million visitors in the United States each month. For The Huffington Post, which began as a liberal blog with a small staff but now draws some 25 million visitors every month, the sale represents an opportunity to reach new audiences. For AOL, which has been looking for ways to bring in new revenue as its dial-up Internet access business declines, the millions of Huffington Post readers represent millions in potential advertising dollars.
“This is a statement that the company is making investments, and in this case a bold investment, that fits right into our strategy,” Mr. Armstrong said in an interview Sunday. “I think this is going to be a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 11.”
Ms. Huffington and Mr. Armstrong began discussing the possibility of a sale only last month. They came to know each other well after they both attended a media conference in November and quickly discovered, as Ms. Huffington put it, “we were practically finishing each other’s sentences.” She added: “It was really amazing how aligned our visions were.”
One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. Their ability to leave comments on Huffington Post news articles and blog posts and to share them on TwitterFacebook has been a major reason the site attracts so many readers. It is routine for articles to draw thousands of comments each and be cross-linked across multiple social networks. and
Mr. Armstrong and Ms. Huffington say that AOL’s local news initiative, Patch, and its citizen journalist venture, Seed, stand to thrive when paired with the reader engagement tools of The Huffington Post.
AOL’s own news Web sites like Politics Daily and Daily Finance are likely to disappear when the deal is completed, and many of the writers who work for those sites will become Huffington Post writers, according to people with knowledge of the deal, who asked not to be identified discussing plans that are still being worked out.
I got one thing to say about the above. I give it a year; and Huffington Post and AOL will both be gone. The truth is, that Huffington Post was swirling the drain, according to some of my well-placed sources and Huffington was looking for a buyer. She finally found a sucker, with deep pockets. The problem is that AOL is quickly becoming a relic of the old days of the internet; as in Pre-web 2.0. AOL has tried to keep up; but the majority of internet users, like myself; recoil in horror, when people say, “I am on AOL!”
Again, I give it a year.
Update: Ed Morrissey, always the nice guy, says:
It should be an interesting transition to watch, though. None of these oddities takes away from Arianna’s success, either, in building a blogospheric empire and realizing a fortune from it.
Yeah, she built an empire of wealth; because she was already damned wealthy, because she supposedly “unknowingly” married a guy, who was involved in politics and he turned out to be gay. Further more, the Huffington Post exists for one reason and one reason alone. To propagate socialist Liberal propaganda and make a mockery of Conservatism. In other words; that marble-mouthed socialist got rich off of disparaging American values and our capitalistic system in this Country —- All the while getting rich off of it — or in her case, richer.
Again, it is pathetic and straight up hypocritical. But then again, we are talking about American socialist liberals, are we not?
Update #2: Roundups by MediaGazer, TechMeMe and Memeorandum