AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced yesterday that the company will cut 900 jobs as part of the company’s reorganization. Wired reports that cuts will include 200 editorial staffers from U.S. offices and about 700 workers in India. The massive layoffs were planned as part of the recent $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post.
AOL’s senior vice president of news, Jonathan Dube tweeted that his staff of journalists were now elligble for work elsewhere.
NYT executive editor Bill Keller wrote a piece yesterday addressing the merger of Huffington Post and AOL, criticizing the move:
“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe… But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material, like the hardworking content writers. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.
Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.
Do you share Keller’s opinion of aggregation sites? Let us know in the comments.
