AOL Picking Up Journalists Shed By Conventional Media 94
Hugh Pickens writes "David Weir writes on Bnet that the thousands of journalists being let go from newspapers, magazines, and television networks have increasingly been showing up on AOL's payroll — over 1,500 in the last eighteen months — a number AOL expects to double or even triple over the coming year. 'Over time, talent is a fixed cost,' says Marty Moe, Senior Vice-President of AOL Media. 'You can syndicate it, distribute it as you scale. Furthermore, we are already the largest branded content company in the US, with an audience of 75 million domestic uniques. At our size, we can leverage the cost of our publishing and content management systems along with the talent and make the whole thing do-able on an advertising model.' Weir writes that AOL's turnaround started three years ago via the acquisition of Weblogs, Inc., and its set of branded verticals, including Engadget in technology, Autoblog covering the auto industry, and Joystiq covering gaming."
Re:Somebody needs to pay these guys (Score:3, Informative)
I was OK with the Floppy disks, all you need to do is format them and you have a nice black floppy. When they switched to CD's that is when it got bad. As you couldn't rewrite them.
Turnaround my ass... (Score:4, Informative)
AOL's acquisition of these well-trafficked "blogs" was a turnaround alright. It was a turnaround for the blogs. They all started to suck.
It's almost guaranteed that if you see the AOL logo at the bottom of a blog, it's going to be a maze of links you think head off to references, stories, and other places of interest, but instead link back to other pages on the blog itself. Imagine slashdot if the link to TFA was just a link back to the dupe from three days ago, and you've got every AOL blog out there.
It's a shame, 'cause some of them were pretty good before the takeover.