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AOL Leaps Into Original News Content With PoliticsDaily.com
AOL will launch PoliticsDaily.com in April with veteran political journalists Melinda Henneberger and Carl Cannon, moving the portal toward becoming a producer of traditional news.
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This story has been updated from its original version.
New Media is about to meet Old Media. But not in the way you’d think.
AOL is about to launch a politics site, hiring well-respected political journalists to do reporting and analysis, and thus moving the Time Warner division more aggressively toward becoming a producer of traditional news.
The site's top editor will be Melinda Henneberger, who has been on staff at The New York Times, Newsweek and, most recently, Slate. Henneberger told TheWrap that the launch will take place in April, "pegged to Obama's first 100 days in office."
With cutbacks and collapse dominating most newsprint outlets (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced on Monday it would no longer produce a print edition), finding talent for an online portal has been almost an embarrassment of riches.
AOL’s site will be “polypartisan” and focus initially on commentary rather than breaking news, Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL’s MediaGlow content division, told TheWrap.
"AOL is investing in a big way in news and in old school journalism," Henneberger said. The goal is "quality news sites that have zero aggregation, original content, that pay writers a living wage, and that pay bloggers."
Might other big digital media companies follow suit?
With the consumer craving for news looking stronger than ever after a riveting election and a confusing economic downturn, you might even ask, why wouldn’t relatively solvent companies like Yahoo and even Google try to produce more of their own news and original content?
The glut of available talent has helped AOL lessen the risk of moving into new territory. With the new politics site, AOL will add gravitas to an editorial mix that includes sites for country-music lovers and video gamers. Said Moe: “We’re able to launch new sites with journalistic talent at levels unheard of in the past.”
Henneberger confirmed that she has so far hired three writers and "two and a half" editors. The writers are Carl Cannon, White House correspondent for National Journal, USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro, and Patricia Murphy, creator of citizenjanepolitics.com.
Other portals are expanding their ambitions, too. Yahoo is moving steadily into web video, with the announcement on Monday of a new celebrity mom show, and there are rumbles that even Google’s Eric Schmidt is reconsidering the technology company’s longstanding aversion to creating its own content, according to one person familiar with his thinking.
If these companies do emerge as large-scale content creators, it will be worth noting that the once-dowdy AOL is leading the way. New AOL head Tim Armstrong may be inheriting a cargo boat of problems, but the company’s two-year-old drive to become a successful source of content is not one of them.
MediaGlow is home to hit machines like celebrity news site TMZ and niche-oriented, category-leading blogs like Engadget, which regularly breaks technology news, and car-nut magnet Autoblog.
The sites together average 73 million unique visitors a month, according to ComScore.
While the new politics site will not at first report breaking news, Moe did not rule that out for the future.
“There’s plenty of real time news flow out there, and so our approach is not going to be to replicate that,” Moe said.
Comments
termiante61 Says
Yes, David Higgins is just as malodorous as he seems.games
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menexis Says
I wonder if the relations with Politicsdaily will remain the same as AOL is now split from Time Warner
Anonymous Says
AOL finally is doing news. It had resisted it for so long with its reliance on repurposing stories from wire services. Now will it hire a diverse staff or just friends of their friends.
democratsarefascists Says
So Ted Turner didn't have enough news outlets controlled by Obama?
He had to add a new one?
By the way, folks, by "original journalism" they mean "making-it-up" journalism. You know, fiction. Propaganda. The fascist ObamaGarbage you can read on Huffington Post and dozens of other party propaganda outlets.
So why read it when you can get the talking points directly from Fuehrer Obama?
Ronald Says
Yes, David Higgins is just as malodorous as he seems.
David Higgins Says
Brock, you may have been the chief Washington correspondent but you still can't spell... "It's" is a contraction of "It is"... There is no apostophe of possession in "Its reporters".
Brock Meeks Says
I was the Chief Washington Correspondent for MSNBC.com for the first 10 years of the organization's existence. I guarantee you MSNBC.com cranks out original journalism on a daily basis. It's reporters break stories, scooping their media partners on a regular basis.
But it's a huge team of reporters, a dozen or so, backed by an army of editors and multimedia producers that keep the site pumping with content from all its other partners.
MSNBC.com has won many journalism awards (I won two of them myself while on staff). I'd put the reporting skills of MSNBC.com up against any newsroom in the country.
And the MSNBC.com have to work doubly hard; imagine having to compete on a story with reporters in your own house; many times MSNBC.com reporters are covering stories that reporters from the NY Times or Washington Post are covering (though they try and steer clear of most pack reporting.)
And, oh yeah, when I left, well... they went out and hired a Pulitzer Prize winner to take my place.
I rest my case.
Abe Says
First of all, you don't know the first thing. MSNBC is a TV channel, while msnbc.com is a Web site. Different companies.
Second, while it does carry video from NBC and MSNBC (its corporate cousins), as well as partners such as NYTimes and WashPost and Newsweek, msnbc.com also has what cnn.com and AOL have never had: two newsrooms with journalists doing original reporting. It has reporters on health, business, sports, a team doing investigative projects, technology, consumer issues, breaking news, etc.
Anonymous Says
MSNBC is a news/web portal; not original news provider. Look at their sources.
Abe Says
Hasn't msnbc.com been doing original journalism for years? (Which is why it's number 1 in news.) You make it sound as if three reporters at AOL is something new.
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