Category: Journalism

This morning, news broke that Verizon is purchasing AOL. Here’s Peter Kafka:

Earlier this year, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said there was no truth to reports that he was selling his company to Verizon. It’s a different story now: The telco is buying the Internet publisher and subscription service for $4.4 billion.

Verizon, which will pay $50 a share for AOL, says the deal will help its “wireless video and OTT (over-the-top video) strategy.” Verizon says the transaction should close this summer.

Armstrong, who left the top sales job at Google to run AOL in 2009, will stay on to run the business after the deal closes, Verizon says.

$4.4 billion for video advertising tech seems … bold. Clearly Verizon is trying to generate income in markets beyond the ones it exists in as an ISP.

Honestly, I don’t care to much about this. I’ve been a paying Verizon customer for years, and while all ISPs are creepy, I can deal with Verizon’s shenanigans.

However, what AOL is best know for, at least in our circles, are properties like Autoblog, TUAW, TechCrunch and Engadget. That’s where this purchase gets interesting, and possibly troubling.

I’ve gotten to know several people at these sites over the years, and they are all good people. My concerns aren’t with the people reporting, but with the business situation these properties have been thrusted into with this acquisition.

While it has since shuttered the site, Verizon made headlines last year trying to blur the lines between tech coverage and corporate messaging.

As I wrote then, there’s a clear difference between running ads to pay for content and having news be shaped by a parent organization.

Of course, having corporate ownership isn’t anything new. In his editorial about the purchase, Verge boss Nilay Patel writes:

Full disclosure: I used to work at Engadget, as did many of The Verge’s founders; we left AOL to start this site. I never felt any editorial pressure at AOL, but huge corporate news like this would frequently leave us spinning without real answers for months at a time. And Comcast Ventures is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, but it should be abundantly clear that we have complete editorial independence from that relationship.

However, it’s possible that these blogs don’t end up as part of Verizon’s empire. Here’s Kafka again:

One scenario we’ve heard is that Verizon intends to spin out some or all of its content operations, like HuffPo, with a third partner, perhaps German publisher Axel Springer.

In an interview with Re/code, Armstrong didn’t address that scenario directly, though he seemed to leave the door open. “We’ve spoken to partners about content and scaling,” he said. “Obviously we’ve seen a lot of interest in the content brands we have. So over the course of the summer, stay tuned.”

Kara Swisher reports that the Huffington Post at least may be spun off as part of the deal.

Late today, Tim Armstrong spoke on this very topic:

TechCrunch is not getting sold off. There will be editorial independence. And from a distribution and resource standpoint, it’s probably the most exciting deal we could have done.

The interview this is pulled from is an interesting look at the acquisition, but I’m sure it won’t be the last word on the marriage of Verizon and AOL. This one will be interesting to watch for a while.

A shocking, tragic loss not only for his family and The New York Times, but for us all.

The Verge’s Micah Singleton:

There goes another one. AOL is shutting down The Unofficial Apple Weblog, better known as TUAW, sources familiar with the situation tell The Verge. The company — which is also shutting down its gaming site Joystiq — is in the midst of a major reorganization, and is cutting back on media properties it deems as underperforming. TUAW’s run comes to an end on February 2nd.

AOL is spiraling, and there are about to be another round of Apple writers on the job market because of it. I’ve got friends caught up in this. Sad day.

Once a year, I’m reminded how glad I am that I didn’t study broadcast journalism in school.

Remember Sugarstring, the Verizon-backed “news” site?

It’s dead.

Here’s Verizon’s statement to DSL Reports:

As you know, we’ve always said this was a pilot project; and as with any pilot project, we evaluate, take our learnings, improve our execution and move forward. That’s what we’ve decided to do here.

via The Verge

T.C. Sottek at The Verge:

For now, it’s easy to shrug off Sugarstring as just another hilariously dumb attempt to make a corporate brand look cool. Its format is somewhere between Digg, BuzzFeed, and Verizon’s corporate blog. It appears to gather much of its content from Reddit. It’s powered by WordPress. It inexplicably has 74,000 Twitter followers. It publishes headlines like “Can you survive without chatting at work?” and “Three reasons Neil DeGrasse Tyson is wrong about innovation.”

But in the broader context, Sugarstring is frightening. It resembles a future where enormous corporations that own the pipes through which speech travels also own that speech. Hell, that’s not even a vision of the future; Comcast already owns NBC, and its promises for good behavior as a vertically integrated superpower have an expiration date.

So far we’ve been worried about the subtle effects of corporate control of the internet — stuff like data caps, and throttling, and “fast lanes.” Sugarstring is something entirely different. It’s brazen, disrespectful, and deeply cynical. There can only be two possibilities for its existence: Verizon thinks people aren’t paying attention, or they’re just too stupid to get it.

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

Verizon is getting into the news business. What could go wrong?

The most-valuable, second-richest telecommunications company in the world is bankrolling a technology news site called SugarString.com. The publication, which is now hiring its first full-time editors and reporters, is meant to rival major tech websites like Wired and the Verge while bringing in a potentially giant mainstream audience to beat those competitors at their own game.

I have no problem whatsoever with publications having advertisers. If you’re reading this on my site, you’ll see both a graphic ad and a text ad. Once a week, I post sponsored content in my RSS feed.

The difference between what I — and countless others — do and what Verizon is doing with SugarString is a clear divide between content and advertising. SugarString screams Verizon, from the red colors to the bold text. Oh, and the Verizon logo. And the “PRESENTED BY VERIZON” graphic at the bottom of the page.

Then there’s this:

There’s just one catch: In exchange for the major corporate backing, tech reporters at SugarString are expressly forbidden from writing about American spying or net neutrality around the world, two of the biggest issues in tech and politics today.

Verizon is one of the worst offenders at trying to limit net neutrality and has taken a major hit in the press over this year’s shocking news about programs like the NSA’s Prism. To help counter this, SugarString editors are allowed to cover these issues outside the US, but not inside. Just check out this article on Hungary’s plan to tax Internet traffic:

It’s every government’s responsibility to keep internet charges as low as possible, so access to high-quality information isn’t limited to the rich. By artificially increasing the price of internet access, Hungary’s government would punish users who were trying to contribute to the world’s knowledge and economy. If they managed to force providers to bear the costs, they’d be punishing those companies any time they grew, discouraging them from increasing bandwidth or improving their services. An internet traffic tax is an innovation tax, and any such tax, no matter how small, would be philosophically devastating.

All that about advertising and content being intermixed is small in my eyes compared to this. SugarString is condemning Hungary for doing what its parent company Verizon has been lobbying for — sometimes in terrible ways — for years.

SugarString isn’t bad journalism; it’s not journalism at all. It’s just plain, old-fashioned PR bullshit that is brazen even for a company as tone deaf as Verizon.

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Jim Dalrymple:

It’s very sad. Glenn is a great guy and friend, but I understand the issues of being an independent publisher on Apple’s Newsstand—it’s not fun. Apple should just admit that they don’t give a shit about digital magazines and be done with it.

I couldn’t agree more; Newsstand should go away, and digital publications should be normal apps that can live right on the SpringBoard, not hidden behind a terrible icon and UI that only adds confusion.