How AOL Buys Top Journos “For a Song”

In a fascinating Washington Post column yesterday, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington described how AOL is scooping up some of the best print reporters from short-sighted print publications:

[E]arlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to – they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers and magazines. And they now have a news room 1,500 journalists and editors strong. Amazingly, failing old media is throwing away their most valuable assets. And AOL is eagerly picking those assets up for a song. Before anyone knows it, AOL may be the most powerful news outlet in the world.

But if consultant-happy print publications are shooting themselves in the feet, the arrangement is mutually beneficial for journalists and for AOL, whose CEO, Tim Armstrong, announced earlier this year that the company plans to shift its focus to “the content business.” Consider PoliticsDaily, which AOL just launched this spring. According to Compete.com, the site had 2,118,229 unique visitors last month, putting them at an overall rank of #820 on the web. These are astounding numbers for a site launched so recently. And its traffic is still going up. How did they do it?

For one thing, AOL.com is a tremendous platform. According to Compete, it had more than 55 million uniques in June. PoliticsDaily has a link on AOL’s sidebar (left), and its stories are a part of AOL’s front page rotation.

But the other key part of the equation is the writers. On Wednesday, AOL’s recently-launched PoliticsDaily.com hired veteran political reporter David Corn away from CQPolitics.com. Corn isn’t some hack blogger: this is a guy who is fifty years old, is the chief of Mother Jones‘ Washington bureau, and broke major news in the Valerie Plame affair — and he’s going to work for AOL. A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable. In his farewell post, he wrote:

I also feel lucky to be joining PoliticsDaily.com, which began this spring. It has recruited some of the best political journalists in the business and some of my favorites, including Lynn Sweet, Jill Lawrence, Walter Shapiro, and Carl Cannon.

PoliticsDaily is just one of many. TechCrunch has a list of some other experienced writers hired by AOL to fill out their full-time newsroom of more than 1,000 people. The list of upstart sites goes on: “manly site” Asylum.com and women’s interest site Lemondrop.com have rapidly emerged as major players in their fields, dwarfing comparable magazine sites like Elle.com and GQ/Details collabo men.style.com.

The tech industry is famous for its second acts, and AOL may have hit upon an unlikely winning formula, though it’s too early to tell. But without great writers and reporters to be had for cheap — and the newspapers and magazines dimwitted enough to slough them off — AOL’s content business would be a certain bust.