We’ve heard that media doyenne Arianna Huffington has been looking for a good perch in the city ever since HuffPo got snapped up by AOL, and now the New York Daily News is claiming that Ms. Huffington is headed to the Upper East Side, where she is may or may not have bought a townhouse on East 80th Street. Read More
Facebook and its underwriters face IPO backlash, the SEC indicates it will target VaR, and more in today’s Wall Street roundup.
Facebook flap: Research teams at Morgan Stanley and other Facebook underwriters cut earnings projections after updated regulatory filings on May 9 showed Zuck & Co. struggling to make money on mobile—and those Read More
AOL will sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft in exchange for $1.056 billion in cash, the company announced today. The dial-up giant retained patents of 300 “core and strategic” technologies, which it will non-exclusively license to Microsoft in the same deal.
The auction for the patents began last fall, part of the company’s long term plan to “unlock value” for shareholders. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2012, and the company says it plans to return a significant portion of the proceeds to shareholders.
Meanwhile, WWD caught AOL and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington at her book party for Kathy Freston (Ms. Freston introduced Ms. Huffington to her business partner Kenneth Lerer), to find out how she felt about about her growing influence at AOL. Read More
Attendees at AOL and PBS’s recent joint “Makers Lunch” at AOL Studios in the Village posed in front of a bank of monitors featuring images of Katie Couric, Condoleezza Rice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and other famous femmes. They were celebrating the launch of Makers.com, a site that features video interviews with a number of lady machers who Read More
New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Goldman kicked off his “Talk” with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong by revealing that Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the AOL-owned Huffington Post, was not very pleased with her own turn in the Q&A column.
AG: After AOL purchased The Huffington Post last year, I interviewed Arianna Huffington. She hung up on me and complained to my editors. So I was pleasantly surprised that you agreed to this interview.
TA: I read the interview when it came out, and it looked like it was rough. We don’t hold grudges around here.
Back in April, Mr. Goldman and Ms. Huffington got into it over the alleged red shift that had struck the news site, once known as the liberal’s Drudge Report, since its merger with AOL. Read More
IMPRESSIVE DISPLAYS OF CHUTZPAH
Alexia Tsotsis was a well-liked and popular tech blogger before she was at TechCrunch, back when she was at SF Weekly. She became even more well-liked and popular when Michael Arrington corralled her into going to TechCrunch, which was shortly before AOL bought the site out and promised Michael Arrington the full editorial autonomy to be as combative and belligerent with his new ownership as he had been with anyone with the past. Not long after, AOL chief content capo Arianna Huffington pushed Michael Arrington out to show him just how much autonomy the irascible feeding-hand-biting blogging mogul had. Because TechCrunch’s chief Kool-Aid mixer, Mr. Arrington, was out of the picture, some of the best TechCrunch writers on staff started quitting. Ms. Tsotsis has held out.
It is now safe to say she appears tired of holding out. Read More
Marie Claire gave Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly a tough but fair Q & A, and you should read the whole thing because it’s fascinating, but these are the undisputed highlights:
You have a very close relationship with Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Tell us something we may not know about him.
Obviously he’s very powerful, a television genius. Even his critics will cop to that. But he is also somebody who looks out for the people who work for him. A couple years ago, I had a very bad stalking problem. I was living alone in D.C. In addition to security Fox provided me, Roger offered to pay out of his own pocket for special dead bolts throughout my home. It was just a small thing, but he didn’t have to do it. I had a boss who cared, and it made me feel better. Read More
I’ve always been a relatively early adopter of new technologies, at least when it comes to cookware and sex. So at a seventh-grade slumber party in New Canaan, Conn., it was I who first brazenly entered the fray in an AOL chatroom with the line, “Okay, who here wants to DO IT?” (At the time, Read More
That has such monetization strategies in it!
AOL struck a deal with American Express to use Serve, which is AmEx’s competitor to PayPal, on Patch Deals, which is Patch’s competitor to Groupon, according to a press release sent out this morning. And we bet their user-feedback is much more advanced than the originals.
Hearst magazine websites Read More
“An explosion of online news sources in recent years has not produced a corresponding increase in reporting, particularly quality local reporting, a federal study of the media has found,” wrote New York Times reporters, Jeremy W. Peters and Brian Stelter. They then high-fived David Carr, hate re-tweeted a Patch story about Read More
