“David Edwards” - AOL confirms that it’s cutting 900 jobs
March 11, 2011
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/10/aol-confirms-that-its-cutting-900-jobs/
U.S. Internet provider AOL Inc. confirmed Thursday that it was eliminating as many as 900 jobs as it incorporates The Huffington Post, which it agreed to buy last month.
About 200 workers will be laid off in the U.S., with the majority coming from the editorial side of the company, an AOL company spokesman told CNET.
Another 700 employees will be laid off in India, the company said. Of those, 300 will be moved to other companies where they will continue to support AOL in roles like operations and finance.
"The changes for me today are very personal," CEO Tim Armstrong said at the Bloomberg Media Summit in New York. "AOL employees deserve a tremendous amount of credit because I don't think it's easy to go from managing decline to managing growth."
"Today, we are announcing an organizational structure that will significantly improve AOL’s ability to focus on growth," he wrote in an e-mail to company employees.
The 900 jobs represent about 15 percent of AOL's overall workforce, according to regulatory filings made last year.
AOL agreed to pay $315 million for The Huffington Post last month. The companies closed the deal Monday, celebrating with the announcement that it had nabbed reporters from The New York Times, Yahoo!, and even Rupert Murdoch's new iPad newspaper The Daily.
"One of the Huffington Post Media Group's main goals is to deliver engaging and high-impact journalism, and these hires are an exciting addition to our reporting team," The Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington said.
"These new hires, which are only the beginning, demonstrate our commitment to great journalism," Armstrong said in a statement.
The latest hires boosted The Huffington's Post staff to around 150 reporters and editors.
The Newspaper Guild, a journalists' union with more than 34,000 members, has launched a letter writing campaign calling on Huffington to share her fortune with the unpaid writers who made her successful.