AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 million

From hotair.com -AOL has agreed to purchase The Huffington Post for $315 million, the two entities announced in a joint news release Monday. “As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content,” the statement said. The new group will have a combined 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world, according to the release, which cited December 2010 data from the marketing research company comScore. The editorial arrangement seems like a strange decision. AOL has been careful to give the impression of political balance in their news and opinion offerings on line. Putting a political activist like Arianna Huffington in charge of all AOL content will upend that balance, and might have a significant number of subscribers and readers heading for the door. The end result might be less a combination of the two readerships and more of a replacement of AOL’s community with that of the HuffPo. Another strange decision, related to the first, is to rebrand AOL’s content with the Huffington label. From here

AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 million