Mediagazer: The Note Arianna Huffington Sent to Her Bloggers About the AOL Acquisition (Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic Online)

11:45 AM ET, February 7, 2011

Top News:

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post — The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

You've Got Arianna: AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 Million in Cash and Stock, Appoints Huffington Editor in Chief — In a bold and definitive move, AOL is paying $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy the Huffington Post, one of the Web's most prominent news and opinion sites.

Arianna Huffington / The Huffington Post:

When HuffPost Met AOL: ‘A Merger of Visions’ — I've used this space to make all sorts of important HuffPost announcements: new sections, new additions to the HuffPost team, new HuffPost features and new apps. But none of them can hold a candle to what we are announcing today.

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Exclusive Video: AOL's Tim Armstrong and HuffPo's Arianna Huffington Talk About Their Acquisition Touchdown From the Super Bowl — Here's an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with Huffington Post co-founder and Editor in Chief Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong this morning …

Discussion: Guardian, Gawker, SAI, Screenwerk and TUAW

Dan Lyons / The Daily Beast:

Huffington Post and AOL: You've Got a Mess — AOL's pseudo journalism, Huffington Post's miniscule ad rates, and editors with big egos and a tough boss will doom the just-created media company. Dan Lyons on the disastrous deal. — It is no surprise that AOL is buying Huffington Post.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Arianna Huffington On Her New AOL Job: “I Want To Stay Here Forever” — Tim Armstrong and company spent yesterday explaining their $315 million Huffington Post purchase to the press. Now they're doing the same for Wall Street, via a conference call. — AOL CFO Artie Minson prepped investors …

Discussion: On Media's Blog, SAI and BoomTown

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Armstrong's Internal Memo To AOLers About The HuffPo Deal — At midnight, AOL announced that it will buy the Huffington Post for $315 million. Below is the internal memo AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent to all AOL employees (except us, they don't trust us with anything) about the transaction.

Discussion: SAI, Lost Remote, Publishing Executive News, VoIP Watch, Fortune, @rabois, @arrington and The Huffington Post

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

AOL + Huffington Post Won't Go to 11. But It Does Make Sense. — There are lots of Web M&As that don't make much sense. But after you get past the “OMG!!!!!” novelty of AOL's $315 million Huffington Post buy, this one has a straightforward logic to it: Old, big, slow company buys new …

Discussion: TechCrunch, GigaOM, The Now/ledge, @espiers, The Huffington Post, Ben Smith's Blog, @latimesrainey and USA Today

Alexis Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:
The Note Arianna Huffington Sent to Her Bloggers About the AOL Acquisition

Discussion: SAI, PC World, tag me with a spoon and Soup

Felix Salmon:
HuffPo's future — The $315 million that AOL is paying …

Discussion: Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast and DealBook

Ken Auletta / News Desk:
Tim Armstrong's Hail Mary Pass

Discussion: Guardian, Adweek and SAI

Steve Case / @stevecase: Why AOL + HuffPost Makes Sense http://bit.ly/fcc2SM I agree, makes sense strategically. Was just teasing about 1+1=11. Congrats Tim/Arianna.

The Daily:

We're Listening — Thank you for all the feedback. We hear you and we are committed to making The Daily the best possible experience. That's our entire focus. — In five short months we've brought The Daily from vision to version 1.0, created a custom content management system …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, Podcasting News, Electronista, Journalism.co.uk, everythingiCafe and TUAW

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Super Bowl XLV: The Daily's Gamble — With a value of $3 million and a reach that can't be matched, an ad on the Fox broadcast of Super Bowl XLV is one of the biggest marketing weapons in the News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). arsenal. Getting one of the house spots is a great opportunity for The Daily …

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable, eMedia Vitals, @leenarao, @mike_ftw, Future of Journalism, @sdkstl, everythingiCafe and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

John Gapper / John Gapper's blog:
The Daily lacks news stories, not multimedia

Discussion: Crikey and Sample the Web

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
The Daily Gets a $3 Million Super Bowl Spotlight

Discussion: Multichannel, rbr.com, AdFreak, SAI, I4U News, @daily, I4U News, AdAge and The Huffington Post

John Hudson / The Atlantic Wire:

Nick Denton: What I Read — How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from a conversation with Gawker Media owner Nick Denton.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, The Editorialiste, NetNewsCheck Latest and @mathewi

Felix Salmon: How to filter out fake news

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Al Jazeera Hopes Reports From Egypt Open Doors in U.S. — DOHA, Qatar — “Our bureau in Cairo has been attacked.” — Phone calls and e-mail on Friday spread that short message through the Doha headquarters of Al Jazeera, the satellite news network. It was an ominous start to the day …

Discussion: TVNewser, The Huffington Post, Yahoo! News, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Inside Cable News and New York Times

Aljazeera: The media battle for Egypt

Ayman Mohyeldin / @aymanm:
Safe & sound after being detained by the military Thanks 2 all for love/support Hope they Release all! Back 2 work Love Ayman #tahrir #jan25

Discussion: Aljazeera and Babylon & Beyond

Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:

The Daily vs. Flipboard: One of These is The Future of Newspapers... Last week Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper The Daily was launched. The Daily is a newspaper app available to U.S. users on the iPad for 99c per week (the first 2 weeks are free; non-U.S. people can download it for trial via this method).

Discussion: Top Digital Journal News and Future of Journalism

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

Best (and worst) Super Bowl social media moments — More people than ever watched the Super Bowl with an eye on their Twitter stream, making this the most social of all Super Sundays to date. From the commercials to the halftime show, here are some of the best (and worst) social moments of the Super Bowl:

Discussion: Groublogpon, CNNMoney.com, AdFreak, News Desk, Gawker, Riptide 2.0, Eater National, Faster Forward, eBookNewser, TechCrunch, the Econsultancy blog, NPR, Lost Remote, eMoney, I4U News and The Awl, more at Techmeme »

Wall Street Journal:

Shorts — With Co-Host Away, ‘Parker Spitzer’ Rises — “Parker Spitzer” sans “Parker” is experiencing a renaissance. — Overall viewership for the CNN evening program, co-hosted by Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, more than doubled this week …

Nora Paul / Online Journalism Review:

Curation questions and the start of some answers — By Nora Paul, Kathleen A. Hansen, Yoshi Suzuki: Information curation, like data visualization, is one of the buzzwords being used by those trying to guide, and goad, news organizations into thinking about new content models.