Sunday, February 06, 2011

Interwebz Jumps Shark...

There'sNoSchoolLikeOldSchool
AOLVille



Seriously.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In one of the biggest digital publishing deals in recent memory, AOL has agreed to pay $315 million for the Huffington Post, the pioneering web-only newspaper co-founded by Arianna Huffington.

The deal is AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's latest and boldest attempt to transform the declining company from one that helped millions of people get onto the internet through dial-up connections to one that informs and entertains them in a broadband world, or as he called it, a "new American media company."....



OK.

Now I get it.....

The way for new media moguls to really go big is to pay their writers even less than nothing.

And make google-eyes at Dinosaurs with cash-flow problems who can't quite figure out how to upload Kardashian B-Shots and Lohanamanian N-Slips hand-over-fist on their own.

It just may be the end of the (western) world as we know it.

Although.

If one must go out whilst amusing oneself to death one could do a whole lot worse than, say, this.

OK?

.

4 comments:

paul said...

We're moving from journalists or reporters to "content farmers," and from editors who assigned stories based on what they thought mattered to readers (we've never really been much on that market research stuff) to assignments driven by algorithms based on most frequent Google search questions, website story hits and related ad potential.
Ken Auletta looked at AOL and the phenom in a good New Yorker article Jan. 24. It's behind their paywall, which suggests some content can still attract sufficient revenue to pay for more thorough journalism.

351 million reasons why i asked said...

I like The HF, does this mean it has gone down the shitter?

RossK said...

Paul--

Thanks for the ref. to the Auletta piece - went and found it in a friend's dead tree version.

You once mentioned how the folks you work for track every single click to every bit of pop culture silliness that comes down the chute...Clearly the content farms and the nipple slips worked in tandem here for Ms. Huffington....I really do despair for our increasingly wilfully uninformed citizenry.

_____
351mil - see para 2, above (and the fact that as the Driftglass says, this time via DMamet, 'she won't pay her Effing writers!').

.

Saskboy said...

I missed that news.
I did hear that Facebook is AOLizing the Internet - I saw that one comin'.