The newly announced $315 million marriage between the Huffington Post and AOL makes plenty sense on the surface, but how will it actually work?
We know that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been struggling to reinvent the once-mighty dial-up service and Internet portal as a scalable content company. We know that in just six years, Arianna Huffington has turned her lefty blog into a sprawling, vertically-integrated (and profitable) content machine.
But going forward, plenty of hard questions remain for both companies and their integration - Here are a few answers.
1. Will AOL now lean left?
It’s the first question many have been asking about the deal -- it's also the biggest. Huffington told the New York Times on Sunday that politics "would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.”
Not everyone believes AOL's new mega-editor.
“This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox [News] is not a partisan-driven institution,” Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg noted on his blog.
But, as Huffington herself pointed out on Monday, the majority of its traffic comes from apolitical content. “We used to be all about politics, now we’re not,” she said during a conference call. Huffington said politics accounts for just 15 percent of our traffic.
Still progressive media pundits, like Rosenberg, are hoping Arianna’s master plan is to “position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News.” And it would be a mistake if she didn’t.
“Arianna’s not going to be buying Glenn Beck,” Jeff Jarvis wrote. “Arianna must be Arianna.”
2. Is Arianna Huffington really going to be AOL’s new boss of content?
Plenty of people have pointed out the irony that Huffington is now, at least on paper, the boss of another outsized ego: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who sold his blog company to AOL for $25 million last year. But the ego aspect of the deal wouldn’t concern me too much.
The bigger question is, will Huffington really do what her new job title, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, implies? That is, lead the editorial direction of AOL’s other big brands, like Autoblog, Engadget, Moviefone, Patch and PopEater?
I highly doubt Arianna is going to be sweating over the editorial direction of Mapquest. But Huffington says she wants to bring back comments on AOL sites, and claims that some of AOL’s current blogs -- AOL Latino, Black Voices -- “fill gaps” in HuffPo's current selection of verticals. (Sites like AOL's Politics Daily and Daily Finance are probably going away.)
But maybe that’s just it: Huffington is much more of a new-media brand ambassador than manager or nuts-and-bolts editor -- and that’s why the deal makes even more sense.
“AOL now has a colorful, eye-grabbing editorial czarina,” Caroline McCarthy wrote
