AOL's Huffington hopes
Rory Cellan-Jones
For the second time in a week, we are seeing a bold bet on the future of online journalism. AOL, once the biggest name in online content, has splashed out $315m (£222m) on the Huffington Post, the blogging empire founded by Arianna Huffington in 2005. That move comes just days after Rupert Murdoch launched his iPad newspaper, The Daily. So now we have two media empires making very different assessments of what the future of news online looks like.
AOL is sticking with what became the accepted web wisdom, that readers will not pay for online content, and advertising is the only business model. The Huffington Post is the most successful example so far of a site that takes what you might call amateur or citizen journalism, builds a big audience around it and then convinces advertisers that it is a good venue to engage with customers.
It will now join AOL's other titles, including the technology sites TechCrunch and Engadget, in an editorial offering to be run by Arianna Huffington. What a coup for the socialite who became an evangelist for the power of the web to transform journalism. In an American media world still largely dominated by old-established giants like the New York Times and the Wall Steet Journal she championed the right of new voices to be heard.
During the 2008 election campaign, one Huffington blogger Mayhill Fowler got a great scoop, reporting Barack Obama's comments on "bitter" people who clung to guns and religion.
When Ms Huffington visited the BBC a few months later, I asked her what the HuffPo contributors got paid for their work. She seemed taken aback and replied that they did it for the glory of having their voices heard .
The Huffington Post does have a paid editorial team, but still relies on unpaid interns and that volunteer army of bloggers to keep the sprawling site fed with content. Not all of them are content with the arrangement - Mayhill Fowler left after a row about not getting paid - and now that they have seen a price put on their efforts by AOL they may be even less happy.
A bigger worry for AOL may be the timing of this deal. I have just spotted this on the question and answer site Quora: "Why is The Huffington Post's traffic plummetting?"
It does seem that the rapid growth that characterised the early history of the site has now come to a halt, with one Quora user blaming the quality of the content: "What used to be seen as a revolutionary and fresh way to get news and information now seems tired, sensationalist, and a little desperate."
But the new partners insist they are creating the right offering at the right time. Here's what Arianna Huffington says about the deal:
"By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform."
Wow, exciting stuff - but look back into AOL's history and you may find a few worrying precedents. The 2000 merger with Time Warner, for instance, was hailed as the perfect marriage of old and new media - but ended in bitter recriminations and divorce.
More recently, there was the purchase of the social network Bebo for $850m (then £417m) - which turned out to be one of the worst-timed deals ever. Within months it was clear that Bebo was last year's big thing, and it was eventually sold for less than one-100th of the purchase price.
Now Rupert Murdoch's latest venture, The Daily, is an equally risky bet on a different vision of the future - that if online news is nicely packaged by professional journalists you can get consumers to pay for it. Mr Murdoch also has a chequered history when it comes to his investments in the online world.
But, for once, anyone who cares about the future of online journalism will hope that both he and AOL can make money from their different ideas of what readers want from the web.
After all we have had plenty of failures in the quest to deliver a sustainable business model for news, so journalists, of every variety, would welcome at least one success.
Credit: BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)
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