AOL Buying Huffington Post for $315 million

Not explicitly feminist news, but pretty big news in the progressive blog world:

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

This also includes its other blogs like EnGadget, Popeater and TechCrunch. My first thought: wow. My second? Meh. The whole reason blogs started in the first place was in response to big mainstream media with a critical eye; now blogs like HuffPo are literally becoming mainstream media. Not saying that no good things will come out of this partnership, but it creates an even a bigger hierarchy that exists between smaller blogs and the massive ones like HuffPo.

The third thought I had is exactly what other bloggers have been asking on Twitter: Maybe they’ll pay their writers now with their new 315 mil? And then we laugh and laugh.