Layoffs continue in the wake of AOL-Huffington merger

Posted by Teemu Henriksson on April 8, 2011 at 5:43 PM

Last month AOL announced that it will be letting go 900 employees - 20 percent of its workforce - as a measure to weed out redundancies after the acquisition of The Huffington Post in February. The merger and the layoffs that followed sparked fear also a

mong AOL's freelance contributors about their future with the media company. These fears were confirmed true earlier this week, as Business Insider reported that AOL's business-and-finance freelancers and contractors had been fired and that AOL is replacing them with a team of full-time employees.

AOL, however, was quick to defend itself, as its business-and-finance editor Peter Goodman sent a note to Business Insider the very same day, claiming that no mass termination of AOL freelancers was taking place. In fact, AOL has been hiring many of its freelances to work for the company full-time, Goodman wrote, adding that the company intends to continue hiring freelancers in the weeks to come.

Goodman confirmed in his note that the move of letting freelancers and contactors go reflects AOL's general shift from paying writers under freelance contracts to investing in full-time staff. The company is turning to a more traditional newspaper newsroom model, with dedicated full-time employees. Goodman stressed that the shift is not motivated by cost savings but by an emphasis on quality: in many instances the freelance budget is directed in its entirety to hiring people.

It seems, however, that most AOL freelancers will be let go. The Awl published yesterday an account of the recent events within the company by Carter Maness, who wrote as a freelancer for AOL Music until he, together with "pretty much everyone" left after earlier layoffs, was let go this week. What certainly contributes to the bitter aftertaste is the fact that the freelancers were informed of the termination in an impersonal email.

According to a story by the Wall Street Journal, laying off freelancers is far from being the only recent change in AOL's operations, as Arianna Huffington starts as the new editor-in-chief of AOL's 56 content sites. The changes initiated by Huffington include discarding parts of AOL's old content strategy and closing or merging of about 30 sites, resulting in two hundred lost jobs. The article goes on to point out that whereas Huffington used to oversee an editorial staff of 148, in her new function she manages one of almost 1300, and the number is only growing because of the move to hire more full-time staff.

Sources: Business Insider (1), (2), The Awl, Wall Street Journal