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The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and were expected to announce the deal Monday morning, says the New York Times. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock, the NYT reports. Arianna Huffington would run all editorial content for the new company.
It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009....Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.
From Arianna's announcement at HuffPost:
I've used this space to make all sorts of important HuffPost announcements: new sections, new additions to the HuffPost team, new HuffPost features and new apps. But none of them can hold a candle to what we are announcing today....Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.
The Huffington Post launched May 9, 2005: here was our post on the first day.