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.
