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Comments: 94 +- News: AOL Picking Up Journalists Shed By Conventional Media on Friday August 07 2009, @07:09AM
Posted
by
timothy
on Friday August 07 2009, @07:09AM
from the save-us-aol-kenobi-you're-our-only-hope dept.
from the save-us-aol-kenobi-you're-our-only-hope dept.
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themedia
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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."
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"Branded verticals"? (Score:4, Interesting)
You could've just said "niche blogs". What makes them "branded" verticals, anyway? It's not like "Autoblog" is one of the news industry's most sought-after trademark endorsements.
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Re:"Branded verticals"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Engadget and Joystiq are linked here multiple times per day, so they must be doing something right.
Re:"Branded verticals"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Paying in small unmarked bills?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you read much about cars? Turns out that Autoblog is definitely an improving brand amongst auto enthusiasts. Autoblog is one of the most quoted and referenced websites on the numerous (and growing) car forums on the net. This challenges the traditional vehicles of auto journalism such as MotorTrend, Car and Driver, and Road&Track. To claim a niche blog is not a brand ignores the very site you posted the claim on.
"Talent is a fixed cost"...says it all (Score:4, Interesting)
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>>>People (i.e., "the talent") are a resource to be acquired, used up and disposed of as cheaply and as profitably as possible.
>>>
That's okay because the company's bank account is just a resource for me to suck as much money as possible, for the least work as possible, before my one-year contract expires. (Also the free pens and paper and staplers are a nice, undocumented benefit too.)
Re:"Talent is a fixed cost"...says it all (Score:4, Insightful)
Bastards! How dare they trade in consensual labour!
Parent
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"People are a resource to be acquired, used up and disposed of"
Just curious here. Are you attempting to imply that traditional newspapers "valued" their human resources, more than AOL might? I hope not. For every recognized name that traditional media has pampered, there have been thousands of names that they threw away as useless. And, I'm sure you'll realize that the difference often depended on back office politicking. Little nonsense things, like, "Who is sleeping with whom", and, "That guy's an as
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Thank god you're not a bookkeeper or CPA because the definition of a fixed cost is anything that does not vary in cost for at least (1) one accounting year. This means that Payroll can be a fixed cost because you already have a budget for that if you're large enough. In the case of AOL/IBM or any other large company like them, payroll is pretty much a fixed cost as they already know how much they're going to spend on it over each year's period. It's also the reason that divisions have layoffs when the compa
I am going to kill myself (Score:5, Funny)
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>>>Turn in your geek card.
Bah humbug. I was geek before most of ye were even born. I was using AOL before most people even heard of the internet. It started circa 1985 with Quantum Link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link [wikipedia.org] - a primitive version of the graphical web for Commodore users. It also gave me access to Global usenet forums like rec.arts.startrek wher you can still find my messages from the 1980s.
Then it evolved into AOL which provided early text-only Gopher and Web browser acce
Re:I am going to kill myself (Score:4, Interesting)
Geek fail. AOL bought Netscape which became Mozilla which of course gave (emphasis on gave) us Firefox, so AOL can be consider worthy of Geek redemption, maybe ;). It certainly looks like the old world media types are really struggling leaving an opening for new world media types to gain market share.
Interesting side point, the old world media types will be more likely to let the journalists that don't toe the corporate line and a more likely to report the news rather than just make advertising look like the news. Net result over time the old world media types will get caught out fabricating the news more and more often by reporters who now work for competitors and who know all the old world media dirty trade secrets.
The internet news channels will be working hard to build a reputation for honestly and accuracy, so as to gain as much market share as possible as news shifts from TV (the idiot box, have to laugh), to streaming content on a computer.
Parent
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Trust me, he could have had worse, he could have had Centurytel. During the bad old days where dialup was all there was CenturyHell made AOHell look like sunshine and puppies. ever here about ISPs using that stupid "mouse metric" to decide where to cut you off? You know, where if the mouse didn't move in x minutes (like if say...you were actually reading a web page) they would cut you off? Well Centurytel took it to the extreme baby, yeah!
Theirs was so bad that if you had a slow connection (and that was
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Somebody needs to pay these guys (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been several [slashdot.org] stories [slashdot.org] on Slashdot recently about the demise of newspapers. Commentary from blogs and elsewhere is fine, but somebody needs to be gathering the primary data. If AOL are willing to pick up the slack on this, I might just start to forgive them for all those damn floppy disks in the late 90s.
They talk about paying for it with syndication and distribution; I wonder if this model can be used to pay for proper long-term investigative journalism, the kind of stuff that is vital to democracy [wikipedia.org].
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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.
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Re:Somebody needs to pay these guys (Score:5, Funny)
My dad tried to make Christmas decorations out of the CDs. They looked hideous and cutting them out made really jagged edges that were pretty dangerous.
I guess I could have used them like ninja throwing stars to slay the call-centre staff. "Yes, I want to cancel my fucking account!"
Parent
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I used those CDs to get about three years of free access in the late 90s. "Why yes my name is Harry Balzac. I'm calling to get my three months of free access. No, no, I've never used your service before - I swear."
Later one particularly good AOL deal allowed me to get a $300 computer for "free" from Best Buy in 2001, if I signed-up for an AOL account. All I needed to do was pay the sales tax ($15).
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I want to cancel my f*ing account
I've heard of bank accounts and credit card accounts but not f*ing accounts. You must have quite the long-term relationship with your hookers.
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Re:Somebody needs to pay these guys (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how other industries dying during a recession is perfectly normal, but for newspapers it's TEH END.
They've still got a good 10 years of churning out pulp before the real DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS kicks in.
/Works for a newspaper corporation.
//Back in the black this fiscal quarter for the first time in 18 months.
Parent
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they had the same kind of user base as Bebo
Funny you should mention that- you realize AOL owns Bebo?
It's time! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It's time! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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BULLSHIT!
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Next.
Will the public demand news? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, they mostly demand entertainment.
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The public doesn't demand anything. They just get what they're given and complain if they don't like it.
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Wow!
This seemed like a really simple statement when I first read it but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was fascinating.
I know when I actually go out of my way to seek news, it's always super depressingly painful stuff. Oh, another suicide bomber in Israel. Great, another insurgent attack in Iraq. Another dead kid. Another brutal beating. The media industry trying to take away my rights. The government wanting to pry into every aspect of my life and that of my friends and family to keep me
Great headline! (Score:2)
AOL are using Conventional Media to lift the garden toolstore belonging to journalists?
~25 years of AOL (Score:2)
It just suddenly dawned on me that I've been a customer of AOL for nearly 25 years! I joined when it was known as Quantum Link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link [wikipedia.org] - a primitive version of the graphical web for Commodore users. Then it evolved into AOL which provided early text-only internet access.
Even today I'm still using their "Netscape Web Accelerator" for dialup access, which is simply AOL by a different name. I'm amazed this company has managed to last for so long.
The Big Media-of-Media Shift (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is pretty big news.
It seems just like when Virgin Atlanic airlines took advantage of complacent and poorly managed (at the top) Pan Am Airlines and cherry picted talent. Look who is around now. I think we may finally be seeing the shift in media from print to web for newspapers. It is a big ship and it takes time. Industries reinvent themselves, sometimes as other companies.
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Re:The Big Media-of-Media Shift (Score:4, Insightful)
For AOL to really turn around they need to rebrand their company. That AOL brand is completely toxic to most people due to:
- overdone saturation CD marketing campaigns that made that brand perennial joke fodder
- a reputation as the walled Internet of the clueless
- AOL nearly single handedly destroying Time Warner (though maybe that wouldn't have been a bad thing) which associates their brand with catastrophic failure
- there is something about Steve Case that just gives me the willies. He strikes me as the ultimate PHB.
I suspect a lot of people wouldn't go to an AOL portal just because its got AOL on it no matter how good the content.
I will give AOL kudos for trying to save journalism when it seems no one else will. Someone needs to save journalism while separating it from dead tree newspaper because that business model needs to die. There simply isn't a rationale for a distribution model that kills millions of trees every year nor for burning the fuel hauling them all over the place.
I still read the New York Times online though I doubt that will continue when the return to the subscription model. I also have a nagging remembrance of how badly they failed when they let Judith Miller run her pro Iraq war propaganda campaign under their letterhead. In general old media completely failed us from about 9/11/01 up until they finally stopped being complete propaganda tools for the Bush administration around the time of Katrina. I'd seriously like to see some good journalists work over the Obama administration and Congress too for their continued pandering to big business. I'm hoping Danial Froomkin will pick up the cause when he starts work at Huffinton Post.
Parent
Oblig. (Score:2)
You've got news!
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.
This could be the smartest thing they've done... (Score:2)
All the historical AOL
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Yeah, maybe they could call it pathfinder.com [wikipedia.org], and use Time Warner's ex-employees to eat TW's lunch for dumping them and AOL. Payback time baby!
Bit of a turnaround (Score:2)
BINGO! (Score:4, Funny)
I just won the web economy bullshit bingo! What I will do with the money I won?
Syndicate with talented fixed-cost do-able domestic model uniques, to leverage and scale my verticals, until acquisition for branding, and then reach the turnaround, of course!
If they are smart (Score:4, Insightful)
AOL, you can help speed things up. NewsPapers need to die.
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NewsPapers need to die.
The newspapers that I choose to read don't need to die. By comparison, AOL's "idea of how to handle the internet" seems to be "news lite", flooded with as many classifieds and the like as possible. Thanks but I'll take the Guardian [guardian.co.uk] and when I want to read more about the US I'll get it from Wonkette [wonkette.com].
What? (Score:3, Funny)
A world where AOL is relevant to the internet? It's a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!
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No, we emit facetime dialog that has high legibility quotiants.