Media critics say HuffPo-AOL makes sense

AOL's $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post is dominating today's media headlines, and the usual pundits have been dutifully airing their analysis and opinion. So far, the consensus seems to be: smart move; makes sense. (Although the deal has its detractors, to be sure.) Here's a roundup of how media writers have greeted the news:

Felix Salmon/Reuters: "My feeling, then, is that this deal is a good one for both sides. AOL gets something it desperately needs: a voice and a clear editorial vision. It's smart, and bold, to put Arianna in charge of all AOL's editorial content, since she is one of the precious few people who has managed to create a mass-market general-interest online publication which isn't bland and which has an instantly identifiable personality. That's a rare skill and one which AOL desperately needs to apply to its broad yet inchoate suite of websites."

Howard Kurtz/The Daily Beast: "It is one more chunk of evidence that online news and entertainment are an increasingly valuable force in a media world once dominated by old-guard newspapers, magazines, and networks. ... AOL's resources could help Huffington expand the product even further, though as Time's journalistic properties learned after the Time Warner deal, being absorbed by a mega-corporation can be a mixed blessing."

Paul Carr/Tech Crunch (which is owned by AOL): "For once I find myself applauding [AOL boss Tim] Armstrong — and AOL as a whole — for pulling off a double whammy: a brilliant strategic acquisition at a logical price. ... It's still far from certain that AOL's lumbering corporate bureaucracy — and obsession with search terms — can ever be compatible with good, fresh journalism. But by putting Huffington in charge of content, Armstrong has given AOL the best possible chance of pulling it off. Acquiring the HuffPo's huge reader-base — and a whole new world of cross-posting opportunities — won't hurt either."

Jeff Jarvis/BuzzMachine: "Content alone isn't enough for AOL. It has content. Lots. What HuffPo and Arianna bring is a new cultural understanding of media that is built around the value of curation, the power of peers, the link economy, passion as an asset, and celebrity as a currency. As a friend of mine reminds me via email from London, HuffPo, thanks to its roots, also has a keen understanding of the value of technology innovation to build platforms. Unlike old media companies, HuffPo groks scale."

Om Malik/GigaOM: "For Huffington and her partner and investors, this is a sweet deal. Why? Because they are selling at the top of the market! ... AOL's moves are much like the ending scene from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Surrounded by the Bolivian Army, Dos Hombres have no choice to make a gallant dash to their horses, guns blazing, hoping against hope as thousand guns blaze around them. The ever-increasing web inventory is like the Bolivian Army firing on AOL and others who have not yet come to terms with the futility of chasing page views."

Marshall Kirkpatrick/Read Write Web: "That's an incredibly bold move and a big bet of AOL's remaining revenue streams on the future of content on the web. It's hard to imagine a better bet in that direction. Huffington has demonstrated a clear ability to win at the bulk and low-cost content game."

Peter Kafka/All Things D: "After you get past the "OMG!!!!!" novelty of AOL's $315 million Huffington Post buy, this one has a straightforward logic to it: Old, big, slow company buys new, small fast company, hopes some of the zippy mojo rubs off. Steve Case is right to point out that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's 'one plus one equals eleven'logic didn't pan out during the first boom, when Case was running AOL and engineered the disastrous Time Warner deal. But here, at least, both companies are trying to do the same thing: Make a lot of Web stuff at a low price, and sell ads against it."

Michael Wolff/AdWeek: "What's wrong with the Internet and with HuffPo and with AOL is that Internet content CPMs suck. HuffPo, as a senior-most media buyer told me over lunch last week, will sell anything and do anything for an ad buy—becoming the true generic mix-up of the sponsored and the true—and still it couldn't muster a CPM that was worth much. That would be true of AOL, too. What the business demands, then, is ever-more traffic—and this is where the combination is arguably "one and one makes three" (we conger an extra page view from your traffic, you conger one from ours)—ever more miserly economies of scale, and a whole new level of clout."

Nick Denton: "I'm disappointed in the Huffington Post. I thought Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer were reinventing news, rather than simply flipping to a flailing conglomerate. ... AOL has gathered so many of [Gawker's] rivals— Huffington Post, Engadget, Techcrunch—in one place. The question: Is this a fearsome Internet conglomerate or simply a roach motel for once lively websites?"

Dan Lyons/The Daily Beast: "The truth is, this deal is not a victory for either side. It's a slow-motion train wreck and will end in disaster. ... Journalists live in a world of story-telling, and where the value of a story, its power to resonate, is something they know by instinct. Some people have better instincts than others. Some people can improve their instincts over time. The other part of storytelling is not the material itself but how you present it. Some can spin a better tale out of the same material than others. But no great storyteller has ever been someone who started out by thinking about traffic numbers and search engine keywords."

Tom McGeveran/Capital New York: "It is a bet on news in one sense, though: It's a bet that people want news badly enough that a secondary product, a middleman, is needed to guide them through it all. What value does Huffington post add to the news? ... What is it about the environment of traditional journalism that makes it so that readers are more likely to interact with the Huffington Post reblog of a New York Times article than they are with the article itself?"

(Photo of Arianna Huffington, Sept. 2010: Mark Lennihan/AP)