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The Huffington Post Media Group announced Friday that it became the latest online news source to implement a paywall — a very, very selective paywall, applying only to employees of The New York Times and residents of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Improbable? Naturally: Check your calendar.
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Huffington Post Media Group continues to expand, announcing six new hires Tuesday that bring its total since the merger of AOL and The Huffington Post to 23 editorial-staff additions.
New criminal justice reporter Radley Balko had been a senior editor at Reason magazine.
Rebecca Carroll, who has held editor positions at Uptown and Paper magazines, is on board as culture editor of Black Voices.
New deputy entertainment, culture, and lifestyle editor Maura Egan comes from T Magazine, The New York Times‘ fashion and lifestyle magazine, where she had been travel editor since 2008.
GOOD education editor Amanda Millner-Fairbanks was named education reporter.
The new religion reporter is Jaweed Kaleem, who had held the same post at The Miami Herald since 2007.
And Christopher Spurlock will become infographic design editor in May after graduating from the University of Missouri, where he produces infographics for the Columbia Missourian.
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/) announced the opening of a sales office in Paris to be led by newly appointed marketing director for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Laurence Bret-Stern.
Bret-Stern joined the professional networking site from AOL, where she had been leading European marketing efforts.
The Paris office joins other LinkedIn outposts in London, Amsterdam, and Dublin.
The State of the News Media 2011, an annual report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, examined AOL‘s investment in news prior to its $315 million agreement to acquire The Huffington Post.
According to the report’s findings, prior to the HuffPost acquisition, AOL added 900 employees during the summer of 2010, with about one-half of them going to its Patch hyperlocal news network.
According to the PEJ News Coverage Index, 42 percent of top stories on AOL News in 2010 were written by AOL staff, up sharply from 7 percent in 2009.
As for Patch — currently in around 800 towns, with a goal of topping 1,000 by the end of 2011 — AOL spent $50 million in 2009 alone. According to comScore, Patch had 3 million unique visitors in December 2010, about 80 times its audience of December 2009.
As for its new acquisition, not factoring in hires announced Monday or last week, most of HuffPost’s staff was made up of curators and editors, and not content creators, with just four out of 60 staffers in 2009 named as reporters, and that number at around 18 in 2010.
Just two business days after it was out with the old at AOL and Huffington Post Media Group, it was in with the new, as the division created by the merger of AOL and The Huffington Post announced several new hires, including two high-profile additions — Twitter co-founder Biz Stone as strategic impact adviser, and veteran journalist John Montorio as culture and entertainment editor — as well as the promotion of HuffPost senior political editor Howard Fineman to editorial director for the group.
Huffington Post Media Group and AOL also announced the addition of two new neighborhoods in Newark to Patch, in partnership with that city’s Twitter-friendly Mayor Cory Booker, and the launch of its 30-Day Service Challenge employee volunteer initiative.
Stone will advise on social impact and cause-based initiatives, including the development of a platform to make it easier for people to perform services in their communities. He will also recruit other companies to invest in and deploy best corporate practices, and create and develop a video series spotlighting companies and executives that are stellar in philanthropy and corporate responsibility.
Montorio boasts more than 30 years of experience reporting, writing, editing, and managing news staffs, including stints with The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
In his new role, Fineman will help shape Huffington Post Media Group’s overall coverage, as well as working to integrate AOL news and information brands. He will also guide coverage of the upcoming presidential campaign coverage, continuing to report for HuffPost, and retaining his role as an analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
Other new editorial hires across Huffington Post Media Group:
White House correspondent Jennifer Bendery, who had been covering The White House and House and Senate Leadership for Roll Call for the past three years;
Culture/style reporter Caroline Dworin, who had been a regular contributor to the City section of The New York Times and appeared in anthology More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times;
Workplace reporter Dave Jamieson, who formerly covered transportation issues for TBD;
General assignment writer Saki Knafo, who previously wrote for The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Believer, GQ, and Publishers Weekly;
News editor Simone Landon, who had been producer of Morning Edition for Rhode Island Public Radio;
Real estate editor Catherine New, whose work has been published by The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Metro Newspaper, Flavorpill.com, Men’s Vogue, and Psychology Today;
And four new Jefferson young journalists: Katherine Bindley, who graduated from Georgetown University and was a regular contributor to The New York Times City section, as culture/style reporter; Laura Gottesdiener, who graduated from Yale University and was a staff writer for The Brooklyn Paper, as lifestyle reporter; Joy Resmovits, who graduated from Barnard College and has been at The Jewish Daily Forward since 2010, as education reporter; and Laura Stampler, who graduated from Stanford University and has written for The New Republic, The Nation, and The Miami Herald, as lifestyle reporter.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent an email to staffers detailing the much-reported layoffs taking place Thursday. The full email appears after the jump, but highlights follow:
• Affected employees will be notified by 3 p.m. ET Thursday, followed by an all-employee call at 5 p.m.
• Nearly 200 people in the media and tech groups in the United States will be affected, along with nearly 700 in India, with some 300 of the latter transitioning to outsourcing partners.
• Assistance programs will be made available to affected employees.
• The concept of towns and mayors is being scrapped. Department editor positions will be created for each editorial department, and their partners will be the general managers (formerly mayors), who will continue to serve as CEOs.
The Huffington Post Media Group announced its first six hires since the merger of The Huffington Post and Aol: Michael Calderone (as previously reported), Trymaine Lee, Michael McAuliffe, Jon Ward, Bonnie Kavoussi, and Lucas Kavner.
Calderone, formerly of Yahoo! News’ The Cutline, will be senior media reporter. New senior reporter Lee had been with The New York Times. McAuliffe, previously with the New York Daily News, is the new senior congressional reporter. The Daily already suffered its first loss in Ward, who was named senior political reporter. New business reporter Kavoussi is set to graduate from Harvard University. And Unigo founding editor Kavner will be The Huffington Post Media Group’s entertainment reporter.
Aol CEO Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, who will be president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group once the merger between Aol and The Huffington Post closes, spoke at the paidContent 2011 conference in New York Thursday, as captured by Beet.TV.
Huffington said she “won’t mess” with Aol properties such as TechCrunch and Engadget, adding that the platform for bloggers will be larger and more attractive post-merger. Armstrong touched on Aol’s video plans.
Aol News is looking to enforce the concept that news is real-time with its launch of Aol News Real-Time, which adds real-time badges to its 100 most active articles, as well as highlighting the top six stories being read at that moment, complete with reading counts.
The goal, according to Aol News, is to bring the news to life and give users information on how many people are reading stories at the same time, as well as where other users are going in real-time.
Citing limited resources, competition from Rockville Patch, and the confusion of having “two different conversations going on,” hyperlocal news site Rockville Central, which covers Rockville, Md., announced that all of its content will now be housed on its Facebook page, Nieman Journalism Lab reported.
Rockville Central editor Cindy Cotte Griffiths told NJL 2,000 of the site’s average of 20,000 monthly hits come from Facebook, adding that rather than duplicating efforts on the Web site and Facebook page, the staff will focus on community building and conversations around the news. She added:
There are always two different conversations going on. (Facebook is) where the people are. Everyone’s always trying to get people out of Facebook, and we’re like, “Well, we’re already here.” It seems like a place where people are themselves. We’re curious to see what happens with that.
For entities and organizations that are trying to turn a profit, or have other institutional or organizational reasons to have a separate identity, it can make sense to have a separate Web space. But Rockville Central is different and, as we thought hard about it, we realized we could find no compelling reason that Rockville Central needs to exist as a separate rockvillecentral.com site.
There’s this big party. It’s likely only to get bigger. And we want to be in there.
