Four Tuesday

1. News Corp.-owned MySpace is about to be sold for an astonishingly low $30 million and will probably devoured (half the staff could be laid off). No one is surprised. And no one has heard of the potential buyers. All Things D

2. The merging and consolidating at AOL-Huffington Post begins in earnest this summer. Many of the AOL landing sites will be folded into Huffington Post - Politics Daily gets rolled into HuffPost Politics, for example. As a result AOL's brands will drop from 53 to 20 and HuffPost will expand from 28 to 36 sections. TechCrunch

3. AOL's streamlining reminded me of a 2009 post I wrote. Maybe I was on to something. Reporter G

4. The New York Times Co. has partnered with USC to offer online extension courses. This is about branding and making money. Only one of the 40 courses has to do with journalism. Inside Higher Ed (found via LA Observed)

AOL readies the axe (*updated)

AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million. The deal went through Monday. Today, All Things Digital reports that AOL plans to "lay off up to several hundred staffers starting tomorrow" and that the targets include editorial employees. Some of the layoffs are meant to clean up "redundancies" caused by the Huffington Post acquisition. The report also hints that certain areas of the country, perhaps where AOL media is having a hard time getting traction, will see cutbacks.

*Business Insider got hold of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's memo to employees. Turns out 900 employees will be canned overall, 200 of them on the editorial side. An example of Armstrong's spin: "The structural changes at AOL are possible because of the progress we have made as a team in the last 12 months." Progress leads to layoffs in the corporate world.

Meantime, Arianna Huffington, now editorial director for all of AOL, has some plans of her own. Again, from All Things Digital:

Sources said she is likely to be making some dramatic changes, likely to be announced soon, to the way editorial products are created and presented to consumers.

The vague "dramatic changes" is enough to send shivers up most people's spines, especially when preceded by layoffs and prepared by someone who thinks exposure is a good substitute for a pay check. However, given AOL's own track record at handling editorial content (see here), the changes could be an improvement.

A cloud passes over Sunnyvale

Yahoo plans to layoff between 650 and 700 employees today. Most of the affected workers are in the companies product division, according to All Things Digital. Those who receive pink slips will be forced to leave the premises, whereupon they can begin to contemplate what happens next this shitty Christmas season.

Building walls around Time

Online readers will now only see abridged articles on the Time magazine website, unless they have a subscription of the iPad app, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reports. Kafka doesn't think much of the paywall strategy:

Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They’re supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago.


So if that’s the case, what the’s real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn’t as real as we’ve been told.