Journalism Futures 2

Who owns the Huffington Post?

Eight months ago, in February 2011, The Huffington Post was bought by the media group AOL for a fee of $315 Million Dollars.

As part of the merger, the original co-founder of the Post, Arianna Huffington, was appointed president and editor-in-chief of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group. This new media group incorporates a number of additional, AOL owned, subsidiaries that include but are not limited to, Patch Media, AOL Music and Engadget.

According to an article by The Huffington Post on, 'The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age - leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms'. Its goes on by saying, 'The combination of AOL's infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post's pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement'.

So, what are the implications?

Firstly, there may be some concern over this kind of merger and its effects of journalism as a paid profession. The tightening of ownership and control will inevitably result in the loss of jobs, AOL reportedly jettisoned a number of its other websites in preparation for the Huffington deal, which as we know, pays only a select number of writers, whilst the remainder of its content is either aggregated or acquired, free of charge, from the blogging community.  

Secondly, and perhaps more ominous, is the degree of control that will be handed to the newly appointed president with regard to the AOL homepage. A point raised in a web-article, written by Tommy Christopher, 'Arianna Huffington will now control the AOL Welcome Screen, the portal that drives millions of AOL users to network content every day'. Therefore, the potential to send traffic to the Huffington website for content that could be sourced from one of its competitors, is all too real.