IT'S OFFICIAL: AOL Fires Freelancers*
A couple of weeks ago, AOL threw its freelance journalists into purgatory: — They were supposed to sit tight and wait to hear from their editors on their roles in the post-merger Huffington Post Media Group. — The freelancers, naturally …
Context & Ripple Effects
The firings close a loop that started with AOL's June 2010 plan to hire 'hundreds' of journalists for its reorganized content division, and accelerated once Tim Armstrong warned in early March that after the Huffington Post deal closed there was 'no way around' layoffs. Since then AOL has been culling its content sites, asked TechCrunch to tone down its coverage, and prepared several hundred staff cuts.
What changes today is who absorbs the cut: rather than trimming only salaried staff, the Huffington Post Media Group is formally terminating the freelance bench entirely, forcing every contributor relationship through the merged group's new editor structure. Coverage at the time framed the two-week limbo freelancers sat in as symptomatic of what The Daily Beast called a 'mess' in how the merger was integrating editorial teams.
First-order effects
- AOL's freelance journalists lose their assignments outright, with re-engagement now contingent on editors rebuilding contributor rosters inside the Huffington Post Media Group.
- Going.com — acquired by AOL in 2009 at a reported $10 million value — is confirmed to shut down on May 1, 2011, removing one of the sites the surviving editors would have overseen.
Second-order effects
- With the site-cull already underway since March 22, remaining full-time editors inherit consolidated beats with fewer contributors per property, raising output pressure on a smaller roster.
- A rumored sub-$10 million acquisition of hyper-local aggregator Outside.In — unconfirmed by AOL — signals the company may be buying cheap local content infrastructure even as it sheds the freelancers who produced similar material in-house.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AOL's editorial model pivots from broad freelance networks toward owned properties and cheaper aggregated or structured content, making contributor pay the swing variable in portal economics.
- The episode feeds a broader debate over whether scaled-up digital newsrooms can integrate acquired brands without burning the independent-contributor relationships that made them cheap to run — an integration-risk question every subsequent media acquirer inherits.
The trend: Post-merger digital media consolidation is trading flexible freelance workforces for centralized, owned-content operations, with integration speed set by the acquirer's cost targets.