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Washington (AFP) March 10, 2011 Internet company AOL is cutting 900 jobs as it joins forces with The Huffington Post and seeks to reinvent itself as a major player in online news. A source close to the company told AFP on Thursday that AOL is laying off around 200 employees in the United States and another 700 in India, nearly 20 percent of its 5,000-strong global workforce. The 200 employees losing their jobs in the United States were mostly employed in the AOL media and technology groups, the source said. Some 300 of the 700 employees being laid off in India would transition to third-party companies providing services to AOL, including Hewlett-Packard and MindTree, the source added. AOL completed its acquisition of The Huffington Post on Monday. AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong warned last week the purchase would result in layoffs at AOL but would also provide $20 million in synergies between the organizations. AOL stock was up 0.75 percent on Wall Street on Thursday at $19.49. Speaking at the Bloomberg-Businessweek Media Summit in New York on Thursday, Armstrong outlined plans for a company whose name has become synonymous with the dotcom era's excesses. "On the media side of the business I want to run a content-driven company," Armstrong said. With the $315 million buy of The Huffington Post, AOL will rely less on freelance journalists, the source told AFP, and there will be a "net gain" in editorial staff despite the layoffs. The Huffington Post, which was launched in 2005 by Greek-born Arianna Huffington, employs around 150 reporters and editors. The Huffington Post has attracted a strong following -- more than 25 million unique US visitors a month -- to its lively mix of news, entertainment, opinion and blogs submitted by academics, entertainment figures and politicians. It has enjoyed spectacular traffic growth at a time when US newspapers are struggling to cope with a steep drop in print advertising revenue and circulation and the migration of readers to free news online. Huffington will preside over all AOL Media and AOL Local properties as president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. The Huffington Post buy was the latest high-profile purchase by Armstrong, who joined AOL from Google two years ago in an attempt to turn around the company. In September, AOL purchased TechCrunch, a leading Silicon Valley technology blog. Other AOL properties include Engadget, Patch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog and StyleList. AOL has invested heavily in Patch, which provides local news in hundreds of communities across the United States, and a "citizen journalism" operation called Seed. AOL, formerly known as America Online, fused with Time Warner in 2001 at the height of the dotcom boom in what is considered one of the most disastrous mergers ever. It was spun off by Time Warner in December into an independent company.
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Commentary: BI (or Before Internet)Washington (UPI) Mar 8, 2011 The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist factions staged hit-and-run attacks against government buildings and officials in the early 1980s and almost succeeded in killing the president of a country that has remained eerily quiet during the geopolitical tsunami that is still sweeping the Arab world. You're supposed to guess which country. The president was on an official state visit to ... read more |
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