AOL is as clueless about layoffs as it is about content

Read Eric Snider's piece, "Leaving in a Huff," to see how AOL thoroughly mishandled the layoffs of freelancers for one of its specialty Web sites. The site, Cinematical, was one of the properties placed under Arianna Huffington's control as part of AOL's acquisition of the Huffington Post.

Snider is able to distill bitterness into sardonicism, making his account thoroughly entertaining. The portrait he paints of the company is altogether consistent with the mental image conjured up by the AOL Way slides.

At the time of the Huffington Post acquisition I wrote:

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).

I was wrong in that not everyone is leaving of his or her own accord: as Snider notes, AOL/HuffPo has been terminating the services of freelancers, preferring to keep the work for full-time, in-house employees. However, I was right that the company is driving off the talent that made its acquired properties valuable in the first place. We'll see if people continue to frequent those properties out of habit, or if the sites lose their cachet just as they have lost their best writers.