AOL ♥ HuffPo. The loser? Journalism

"To grasp the Huffington Post's business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates"

Tim Rutten @ LA Times - Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL's $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it's already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.

That's a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers.

To understand why, it's helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL's last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Brentwood-based Arianna Huffington's astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years.

The media-saturated environment in which we live has been called "the information age" when, in fact, it's the data age. Information is data arranged in an intelligible order. Journalism is information collected and analyzed in ways people actually can use. Read more.