I get much of my news from Huffington Post. It has been an excellent source for Wall Street corruption, even if those good links come at the price of also getting a steady diet of woo “medicine” and Hollywood gossip. All in all, though, Huffpo has been a steady provider of valuable information. Let me back up: Arianna Huffington has also offered some excellent advice, such as her campaign that we should all get a lot more sleep.
When I first heard today’s news that AOL has bought the Huffington Post, I was disappointed. That was my honest gut feeling. It immediately occurred to me that AOL will now insist that Huffpo needs to produce significantly more revenue at the expense of progressive commentary. I suspect that that there will be new political pressures to hold back stories inconvenient to the bottom line. Thus I’m not celebrating. But I also know that Arianna Huffington has long been interested in cranking out serious investigative journalism, and I know that it takes money to do this well. I’m still not celebrating. I’m apprehensive.
According to John Nichols of The Nation, though, it is not necessarily time to mourn.
If, with AOL’s resources, she is able to hire more, if she and her team are able to produce more serious content and if they can identify some of those “different ways to save investigative journalism,” it is possible to imagine that the AOL–Huffington Post deal could mark a turning point in the debate about the future of journalism. That’s a lot of “ifs…”
The bottom line, then, is that time will tell . . .
Presented with minor alterations from a website about abuse victims:
Yes, I'm sure this time will be different…
Of this merger, Pharyngula says, "Wait, what? AOL still exists?". He claims, "Huffington Post … is on its way to becoming the Weekly World News of the internet".
As mergers go, it reminds me of when K-Mart bought Sears, shortly after it declared and emerged from bankruptcy.