Brave New Digital World

When AOL and the Huffington Post announced their deal Monday, I was as shocked as anyone. Patch, after all, is part of AOL and soon Huffington Post would be, too.

According to a company press release, AOL will pay $315 million for what it dubbed “the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website.” The purchase, as the company points out, creates a “combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world” and helps AOL move closer toward creation of “a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms.”

“The combination of AOL's infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post's pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement.”

Personally, I’m excited by the move. What it means for Patch, for the Huff Po and other pieces of the new entity will become clearer over time. (Anyone who has any questions about corporate strategy other issues should contact our Public Relations Department.)

The issue here, at least for me, is not so much what happens to Patch but what this means for the news industry at large.

What will the news business gains from a merger like this? I see it helping to guarantee that real news-gathering will continue to happen. One of the concerns raised repeatedly by observers of the news industry is that the move away from reporting and toward blogging and opinion is leaving the public without the needed watchdog. I’ve always seen that analysis as lacking in nuance. The idea that the Web has been responsible for the newspaper industry’s demise fails to stand up to examination. The newspaper industry has been in decline for three decades, if not longer, with readership falling, newspapers closing and journalists being fired. The damage done to newspapers has been done by newspaper management, which has been ridiculously shortsighted and has gutted the ability of papers to do what readers pay them to do. Newspapers across the country have reacted to shrinking revenues not by being creative and seeking new ways to make money, but by slashing and burning. And as papers shrink staffs and reduce the size of their products, readers start to wonder what they are getting for their money and advertisers start to question the value of their ads.

It is no accident that Gannet in New Jersey announced massive layoffs (the latest New Jersey paper chain to do so), about a month before AOL and Huff Po announced their merger. The Web site, Paper Cuts (www.newspaperlayoffs.com) puts the figure at more than 2,800 newspaper jobs cut during 2010. In the same time period, Patch launched 700-plus new sites, manned by professional journalists.

The digital information revolution has been underway a long time now, and Web-based news services are gaining ground on traditional sources. (See graphic from Pew Research Center of the Pew Charitable Trusts). And new models have sprouted – like the Huffington Post, ProPublica (the nonprofit investigative journalism site) and others to help fill the vacuum left by the retreat of print and, to a lesser extent, broadcast/cable.

This merger – and others that are sure to follow involving other media entities – is about that vacuum and making sure news consumers get the fullest possible exposure to all kinds of news and information. I’m glad I can be a part of what comes next.