AOL + Huffington Post = disaster?

[CHIMO]

If a company is to enjoy success in the world of media in general, and content creation in particular, then two ingredients have to be present. One is a strong culture and the other is scale. It explains the success of any number of brands – News Corporation, the Daily Mail, the BBC, the Financial Times – in the recent difficult past.

For companies that have scale but lack a culture, or vice versa, the obvious yet so often disastrous solution is to merge. Nothing creates greater comedic value or destroys actual monetary value quicker than trying to acquire a culture in pursuit of scale and getting the whole thing wrong.

This is why AOL's purchase of the Huffington Post is causing such intense media interest. It is not the $315m price tag, or the query over whether content businesses have a future, it is really the thought of Arianna Huffington, the Madonna of new media, striding into the AOL boardroom, where many unfairly imagine there are still shovels in the corner. AOL is not only a competitor for the world's uncoolest media brand, but is also to corporate mergers what George W Bush is to US foreign policy.

Tim Armstrong, who joined AOL as chief executive from Google in 2009, wants both the culture and the growth. He has to try to destroy the memory of AOL's two most infamous mergers – first with Time Warner in 2000 and then with social networking platform Bebo in 2008. If there were a competition for worst media mergers in history, these could happily expect to place one and two without any serious competition. Armstrong has been on a content-expanding rampage of late, first investing tens of millions of dollars in Patch.com, a hyperlocal network of low-cost sites, which now has 800 centres, and then a foray into buying high-profile blogs including TechCrunch last September and now the Huffington Post.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/07/huffington-post-aol

[Taverner]

1. It is called the curve of lesser means

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Will they change the You've got mail and use Arianna's voice? For me it would

be a pleasant change.

[PoliticAverse]

3. You can change it yourself to be whatever you'd like... n/t

[saras]

4. Definitely no shovels

"where many unfairly imagine there are still shovels in the corner."
As someone who uses AOL mail (never mind why) I can say with confidence that they haven't had shovels for a number of years. Not because they don't need them, but because they disappeared under the ever-deepening layer of shit.

At this point they don't need shovels, they need Heracles.