AOL buys Huff Post

Via Daring Fireball, a pointer to a New York Times article on the acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL.

This comes on the heels of the apparent leak to Business Insider of an AOL internal slideshow describing how the company will achieve a higher profile and greater profitability. My cursory perusal of the first third of those slides suggests that AOL's profit-oriented mindset and strong desire to secure the largest possible audience will not mesh well with HuffPo's strong political stance.

And the idea of giving Arianna Huffington "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" strikes me as downright weird. What does Huffington know of managing such a diverse portfolio of properties? Why wouldn't AOL have a half-dozen more competent internal candidates available?

AOL smothered Netscape because AOL's management couldn't figure out what to do with such talented engineers. AOL has demonstrated no creative vision, none, in its entire history. Technologically and socially, AOL is a joke. Its sole claim to fame is that it kept sucking dialup fees off of people long after broadband was thought to have killed dialup.

The trouble with AOL's acquisition of HuffPo, from my perspective, is twofold:

1. HuffPo's contributors never had to worry about a big corporation looking over their shoulders, until now. How long will they and Huffington herself be immune to the pressures from above?
2. I very much doubt HuffPo's internal culture, which I can only imagine was pretty loose, will mesh well with the tightly structured, highly bureaucratic organization described in the leaked AOL slideshow.

AOL, I daresay, will have the same trouble with any acquisition that it had with Netscape: its bureaucratic dedication to trendspotting as a substitute for creative vision will suck the life from and crush the souls of any imaginative and creative people that join the company through those acquisitions. The best will leave, sooner or later, and AOL once again will find itself without anybody to do the real work of generating good content (or making good technology, as the case may be).

If I had to bet, I'd say Huffington sees this as her best chance to make real money off the Huffington Post brand. She'll stay at AOL just long enough to fulfill whatever contractual terms were required for the sale. Then she and most of the other HuffPo writers she brought to AOL will head for the exits. Their audiences will follow them, not the Huffington Post brand. All Huffington and her cronies have to do is not to let their credibility be too badly tarnished during their stints as AOL employees.