AOL buying Huffington Post

You do realize Patch hasn't even been around for two years and at least half of the Patch sites launched within the last three months, right?

 

I have mixed feelings on HuffPo, and I've written for them. For free, yes, though I also directly benefited in terms of promotion. (If you've written a book, this is a great way to advertise at the relatively slight cost of writing something you probably wanted to write anyway but had no other outlet.)

It's not quite fair to call them just an aggregator. With all their contributors, they're really more like a giant message board of pre-screened people. They end up with some thoughtful original work in some niche areas like religion and comedy.

But I'd hardly call it an essential read. Fanhouse, yes, which is the real pity of all this. The new AOL content group covers everything except sports, which I find really odd.

 

Yes. And?

At some point, they are going to have to show a profit. There doesn't seem to be much reason to be optimistic that will ever be the case.

 

No argument with with your first point and very little argument with your second. I'm just not sure that they have hit that point yet.

 

For people who don't get it, straight game coverage, like most mainstream news, has been commoditized to the point of being nearly worthless in a crowded market.

 

That's the way I feel about opinion. Everybody's spouting opinion everywhere... how worthless.

What's become premium content is information that nobody else has-- i.e. good reporting. I'm just not sure the market realizes this yet.

 

The point would not be the quality of the opinion, but the fact that we can all be cranks on the soapbox, but with a potential audience of millions. And we like to see if the other cranks agree with us. I hope that you are ultimately right, tho

 

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/08/020811-news-huffington-aol-1-3/

 

So ... writers who willingly agreed to write for zero dollars are upset that in this new deal they're getting zero dollars? Yeah. They have my extreme pity.

This is the part where the general lack of any business sensibility in the journalism set comes to the fore. They can bitch and whine, but why the fuck would Arianna Huffington just go around handing out money to people who have already demonstrated that they don't need or want it?

 

You want to get paid? (Few minutes pass). Sorry, about that. I couldn't stop laughing.

 

A lot of left turns?

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten-column-huffington-aol-20110209,0,7406565.column