As part of the AdTech conference yesterday, a gaggle of press got together to talk to Huffington Post Media Group’s Arianna Huffington , a. k. a my bosses’ boss and Tim Richards, VP of Ad Sales at AOL West Coast. While the cupcake and jelly bean-embellished media roundtable was billed as a discussion about vague stuff like “how to move and engage audiences” and the “importance of being authentic” we ended up talking lawsuit , layoffs and the difference between a blogger and a writer real fast. In the video Huffington, who is extremely charismatic, talks about her goal of setting a clear editorial direction for AOL, which now has 107 brands and 56 editorial properties post-Huffington Post acquisition, “Within a year you won’t be able to tell whether a site originated as an AOL site or a Huffington Post site.”
She wants to turn AOL into what she calls “the media company of the 21st century,” through a convergence (heh) of the best parts of traditional media and online journalism, “to bring together the best of the old world: fact checking, accuracy, fairness, and design and the best of the new world: realtime, immediacy and transparency.” When asked how this grand vision squared with former Engadget editor Paul Miller’s assertion that AOL had “its heart in the wrong place with regards to content, ” Huffington responded: “He was talking about a time that is very different from what we are doing now. All these things preceded what we are doing now and a lot of things preceded Tim Armstrong being the CEO of AOL. One of the problems with a company that has had a relatively long life on the internet is that everything has been subsumed under the AOL brand and a lot of things really don’t belong any more.” The whole interview is filled with gems like this. If you’re a fan of online media and tech it’s worth watching through the entire 56 minutes and 40 seconds but if you don’t have the time jump to minute 53:17 when Twitter’s Biz Stone randomly walks just as Huffington is talking about acquisitions (which aren’t “imminent” she says), “Right now I’m so focused on working with what we have.” I believe it.
