On Friday Paul Miller resigned from engadget after more than five years at the high flying gadget blog. He was the first casualty of AOL’s insistence on pushing the “AOL Way” of doing business as it thrives to be an online media powerhouse. His reason?
As detailed in the “AOL Way,” and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive
The always brilliant Paul Carr over at AOL-owned TechCrunch puts Miller’s resignation in a satirical light and it is a must read.
The AOL Way is a deck of presentation slides detailing the new policy and direction that AOL had recently introduced following its acquisition of The Huffington Post. The reason for this document is to dramatically increase page views by raising the number of published articles. This description, however, is putting things in an extremely simplified way.
What AOL wants to do is pretty close to what Demand Media is doing. It wants each story to reflect, or become, the kind of story that people look for. AOL wants to increase discovery through search by ensuring each piece fully conforms to SEO keywords and take advantage of the hot issue at any particular point in time to ensure the story gets as many hits as possible.
In other words, instead of promoting and enhancing journalism, AOL’s guidance is for its properties to become content factories, churning out stories and articles that maximizes profit ahead of quality. In other words, instead of becoming something like Apple, a design driven consumer electronics powerhouse that churns out highly desirable industry inspiring products, AOL wants to be the Dell of journalism. One that cranks out unimaginative products based according to what’s popular at that time. AOL is taking its properties, each one a leader in its respective areas, and turning them into followers.
Is giving people what they want a bad thing? Not necessarily but as Apple CEO Steve Jobs puts it, people don’t always know what they want. Two centuries ago people wanted faster and stronger horses, but Henry Ford thought differently, so he built automobiles instead.
Long-time Engadget editor Paul Miller departs as AOL becomes the Dell of online journalism
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