AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 Million

[engine]

AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 Million [kara.allthingsd.com]

In a bold and definitive move, AOL is paying $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy the Huffington Post, one of the Web’s most prominent news and opinion sites.

As part of the deal, Huffington Post Co-founder Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–who was derided by some when she co-founded the left-leaning site in 2005 with investor and well-known communications exec Kenneth Lerer–will become president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL.

[weeks]

I understand that the Huffington Post made money last year. But, they had to make a deal with someone like AOL to get their investors' money back.

[lexipixel]

It's all blowing up on them now.

A $105M lawsuit was filed by HuffPost contributors for unjust enrichment and unfair business practices.

The same guy that started the class action suit prevailed in a Supreme Court decision when he sued the NY Times, Lexus Nexus and others for archiving and redistributing freelancers stories in electronic databases, (an unlicensed use/reuse issues).

See: "New York Times Co. v. Tasini" for details.

The National Writers Union has urged writers to boycott Huffington's sites. The Newspaper Guild of America, the AFL-CIO and other unions have endorsed the boycott and said they will not cross the "virtual picket line".

Huffington now controls content on "Patch", Techcrunch, HuffPost and other AOL properties as "Huffington Media Group".

Yesterday TheStreet reported; "AOL Stock Hits New 52-Week Low".

AOL Stock has lost 30% of its value in just the past 6 months and stockholders are nervous as AOL spends hundreds of millions yet reports they will not see any return on the investment this year, (and probably nothing next year either).

This week, just days after the unpaid writers suit was filed against her and AOL, Arianna Huffington shrugged it off and set quotas for all 800 local Patch editors to each recruit 5-10 bloggers each to work for free, (hoping to net a total of 8,000 unpaid workers).

At the same time Huffington, attempting to appeal to the working class, wrote an article on May 10th titled:

If "America Can Do Whatever We Set Our Mind To," How Come Our Leaders Won't Set Their Minds on Jobs?

The article contains quotes like; "There are still five unemployed workers per job opening"... and "the percentage of young adults living with their parents has jumped to a staggering 34 percent, largely because of their limited job possibilities"

She ends the piece with: "how about we set our mind to reigniting the American Dream for everybody, and not just those few for whom the recession is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind reality? There is no bigger Big Thing we can do as a country right now."

The $315M she made off other people work puts her on the "out of mind reality" side of things I'd say.

...Kettle to pot; "You're black".

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

It Amazes me that anyone would value a server with a bunch of 1's and 0's for anything more than the price of a small car. 50 years from now that will be unheard of.

Pssst, big CEO's of the world, you can't buy eyeballs because, well, they wander!