This post is a designed meditation on publications that are strictly digital, and their future under the new reality of agglomeration through acquisition.

Yes, the great landscape of blogs and digital media is a-changin,’ and there is no more conspicuous face in the matter than AOL. AOL, a hulking relic in the very definition of the phrase, coming back from the dial-up grave, is on the warpath with a checkbook. It is, quite literally, redrawing the map of online content.

This is not the moment in which digital publications have ‘come of age,’ or any such nonsense, but it might mark the instant in which a media empire can be built with purely online elements. AOL is trying to do just that.

While that might seem almost laudable, there are cracks in the armor. Two trends outline changes in content under an AOL led future that might not be as wholesome as the company wishes to appear: the AOL way, and recent, seemingly new, standards for contributions to the Huffington Post following its purchase by AOL.

The Huffington Post: Clearinghouse of the Internet

The Huffington Post’s tagline, ‘The Internet Newspaper,’ was more fitting than most of its readers probably knew. It wasn’t just a newspaper for the Internet, it was one done in the style of the Internet. With thousands of contributors from every walk of life blogging away, it had a feel of barely controlled chaos, something that helped to foster its vibrant community of reader commenting.

As the Huffington Post grew, it took on a status all of its own; it still holds to this day the number one influence rating of all blogs as denoted by Technorati. To contribute to the Huffington Post became a mark of having ‘made it’ in one topic or another. And as the publication added new sections, including city specific pages, a Religion forum, and soon, Canadian and UK editions, more and more writers became interested in adding to its pages.

After all, the Huffington Post had what everyone who writes wants, and it’s not money, it offered access to an audience. And so on it went, with new topics, writers, growth, and increasing revenues, until all of that was turned upside down in one fell swoop.

AOL buys the farm

AOL turned out its pockets, found some $315 million to spare, and cut a deal. Rumors have HuffPo founder Arianna’s share at around $100 million of that total.

Of course AOL’s homepage remains massive, holding onto the 17th spot on the most trafficked US site list, 16 slots higher than the Huffington Post today. But if you examine those charts, one is going down while the other is rising. AOL bought the upward graph.

When any publication is purchased, especially one in which the founder is still on board, people fret about the effects of the takeover; will the character remain the same? Will the new owners beat the life out of it? Will its best and brightest leave and find new homes if the new corporate environment is stifling?

The list goes on, and in the case of AOL there is precedent to ground such worries: the AOL Way. The AOL Way, in case you missed the controversy, is AOL’s plan for the future of its publications, including its purchases, not just the ones that it has grown.

The AOL Way is a method of streamlining and SEOing content to make it, borrowing from Daft Punk, “harder, faster, better, stronger.” But what it does not do is bolster author autonomy, or anything along that line; it is a method designed to extract money from content, not to build great publications.

When the AOL Way leaked in full the media, our own Courtney Boyd Myers asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Is AOL destroying journalism for page views?” While that headline is a touch loud, and what headline is not, she is pushing a real point: is AOL going to use their Way to turn down the levels of personality and quirk at the publications that it owns and will buy in the future?

This question is why I called this article “Content control in the Age of AOL,” and took the time to write it. AOL has not just purchased the Huffington Post, but other, quite dear publications, that have long had reputations for the individuality of their authors. And we worry about them.

But in the case of the Huffington Post, are we seeing any changes thus far that might be cause for alarm for fans of the publication’s past form as an independent publication?

Big changes afoot?

The answer to that question is maybe. According to some Huffington Post contributors, a good number bloggers that helped build the site were uninvited to the party without being informed.

One such ex-Huffington Post blogger, Joe Favorito, claims that ever since the AOL purchase of the site things have gone “quiet.” This is what he had to say on the matter:

Then as most know, Huff Po was sold for a huge sum of money, and all went quiet. [Submitted] Posts were never answered for weeks. Email addresses bounced back, phones rang and rang with no voice mail. A “citizen journalist” site disappeared for its contributors.

I was not alone in this experience. At least 15 or 20 others have gone through the same thing. Finally two weeks ago I received an email back from “Becky”…n. last name, a generic email, no phone number…saying that a post I had sent in weeks before “didn’t fit the focus of the site.” I asked what the editorial guidelines were, who I could speak to just to get clarification. Nothing. Not a word.

In a similar vein, a request for comment submitted by The Next Web to the Huffington Post on their editorial guidelines has thus far not been answered.

The end of truly indie big-media online?

The constant struggle between causation and correlation aside, based on other anecdotal evidence and stories like Favorito’s it seems that on some level the contribution guidelines for the Huffington Post have changed under AOL.

And that makes sense. After all, AOL is a company that has deeper pockets than the Huffington Post ever did, making it a much higher profile target for lawsuits. And what what company trying to build an empire would care too much about a few thousand bloggers who are, now that the Huffington Post has all the momentum in the world, riding its coattails a touch?

Such submitted content from unpaid, non-contractual writers is perhaps just too much of a risk for AOL to take on. Even more, now that HuffPo is so large, individual blog posts are hardly big drivers of traffic to the site.

But recall that we called the Huffington Post more than just a newspaper online, but one that embodied the core elements of the Internet: egalitarianism, participation, and so forth. Even if AOL has made the changes that it seems to have made in good faith, they are still transformative in a way that is counter to the old core of the Huffington Post.

TNW checked into the blogger backend of HuffPo and can confirm that, according to what the website says, the blogging guidelines have not been updated since last year:

On the Technorati 100 list, AOL owns three of the top five publications. You have to ask the question, is this the end of truly massive independent online media? If the company continues to purchase as it has been, the top 100 blog list going to become its fiefdom. That level of concentration, coupled with the capitalistic plans of the AOL Way, paints a future in which the biggest media publications are snapped up, and then commoditized.

Happily, there are signs that go contrary to that future. We half-mentioned TechCrunch earlier, another recent AOL acquisition, and a publication that is a TNW competitor. TechCrunch has not suffered, so far as can be told from the surface, any harm except for the occasional forced meeting since they were bought out. Now, TechCrunch is full of spunky writers and is headed by a slightly acerbic captain, which must help in defence of its culture, but I have been surprised at how little meddling has been attempted by AOL.

So there is hope. But dollars shout and most digital publications that are important are quiet; online media has never been a salad fest. So long as AOL, and others, it must be said, want to grow by leaps and bounds they can, and they will. That coupled with a corporate strategy as stark (almost robotic) as the AOL Way and the future of online media looks slightly boring, if nothing else.

What this means for readers, and for writers

Ever since the AOL Way came about, flagship AOL publication Engadget has had a very hard time holding onto its key staff. In fact, they have been leaving in droves. It’s sad to see a blog that everyone so loves and enjoys hollowed from the inside out.

But there is rebirth. Many of the Engadget-exiles have banded together and formed a new, if temporary, home. It is already scorching other blogs and is racking up headlines by the bushel. It’s about the writers, silly.

But it’s also about the readers, who are going to pull up their trusty sites in the future only to realized one day that many of them have been homogenized.

Perhaps the current, and near-term future of digital content can be summed as follows: big interests are snapping up many of the best online publications, but their management plans for those companies are going to force out many of the writers that built them, or they will be forced out as we have seen with the Huffington Post. This will take away much of the spark from those publications, even if it won’t hurt their flagship reporting overmuch.

The very dynamo that built the publications that are, to bend English a touch, under purchase, still exists however, and that is the zero marginal cost of distributing data through the Internet; the people who built what is being purchased can do it again.

That is why when you peer far into the future, past the Age of AOL, things are as bright as ever, even if certain lights are today being extinguished.

A lawsuit has been filed from an unpaid blogger against AOL and the Huffington Post today, just over two months after founder Arianna Huffington sold the site that she co-founded to AOL for $315 million.

The blogger, Johnathan Tasini, was one of the unpaid bloggers who produced a large chunk of the Huffington Post’s content, which published news stories from paid writers alongside unpaid contributors. The suit estimates the value of the unpaid bloggers contributions at $105 million.

In a statement to Reuters Tasini stated that “The Huffington Post is nothing without the bloggers who created the content.”

Tasini filed the suit personally and is seeking class-action status on behalf of all of the bloggers who provided unpaid content for the site.

Tasini is a union organizer and activist who wrote articles that were published on the Huffington Post from November of 2010 through February 11th of 2011, just a few days after the sale to AOL was made public.

In a statement responding to the filing, AOL spokesman Mario Ruiz called the action “completely baseless” stating, “Our bloggers utilize our platform to connect and ensure that their ideas and views are seen by as many people as possible, It’s the same reason hundreds of people go on TV shows to broadcast their views to as wide an audience as possible.”

The case claims that roughly 9,000 unpaid bloggers are entitled to their cut of the profit from the sale of the site.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated as the story unfolds.

As reported in the FT tech blog, The Huffington Post will be crossing the pond this summer to launch its first international version in Britain.

Arianna Huffington announced the news today at the Guardian Changing Media Summit with Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive. (See our post on the AOL Huffington Post acquisition.) The Huffington Post UK edition will start out as a local homepage featuring British content. Huffington also mentioned that she still plans to launch sites targeting French and Brazilian audiences in the future.

While The HuffPost will likely be hiring, AOL also hired 100 journalists in the UK last year that could also provide content for the new local edition. In the meantime, I’ll be in London this weekend, so come find me and I’ll give you a two good reasons (#1, #2) why you wouldn’t want to work there.

The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents 26,000 media employees across the country, released a statement yesterday, encouraging all unpaid writers at The Huffington Post to stop working.

The Guild writes,

In response to the Huffington Post’s refusal to compensate its thousands of writers in the wake of its $315 million merger with AOL, the Newspaper Guild has requested a meeting with company officials to discuss ways the Huffington Post might demonstrate its commitment to quality journalism. Thus far, the request has been ignored.

The Guild’s call to action is in support of a strike first launched by Visual Arts Source. The Guild has also demanded that The Huffington Post should stop posting paid promotional material next to other editorial content without clearly marking it as “advertorial.”

The Columbia Journalism Review reports that there is no news yet on how Arianna Huffington or the rest of the AOL crew will respond. I also reached out to Arianna and her top level staff, no word back yet. At a recent paidContent media conference in New York, Huffington was quoted saying she found the idea of unpaid bloggers going on strike as ridiculous as celebrities and personalities boycotting self-promotional (unpaid) television appearances. “Go ahead! Go on strike! What does it matter?” she said. “[N]o one really notices!”

A bit of disclosure: I wrote several unpaid articles for the Huffington Post last summer during my transition from a South American based robot reporter to full blown NYC tech blogger. And, god I cringe as I write this, (because Arianna is to bloggers what Cruella de Ville is to spotted puppies), but I understand why the Huffington Post doesn’t pay its bloggers.

It’s the same reason why an aspiring 21-year old record producer works an unpaid internship at Def Jam or a poet decides to live in a 10-person closet in Bushwick until The New Yorker finally accepts their haiku. If I had wanted to make easy money and have a steady job I would’ve stayed in ad sales. I used my writing gig at the Huffington Post purely for exposure and access and it helped me land the job I have today. Word to the unpaid writers out there- blogging for The Huffington Post is a stepping stone not a ladder; hop off and move onto greener pastures as soon as you can.

Writing is so fulfilling for me, just like working in art, fashion, music or filmmaking is for others. Having an awesome, creative job means that you worked for free at some point in your life, either eating cheese and toast or living off of Daddy’s credit card. (I did neither, but I’m a born charmer.) Obviously, getting paid is nice, and a $315 million dollar pay day from AOL is nice too.

So, Arianna, how about a draw? Cut down the quantity and up the quality by telling some aspiring writers no and telling the rest of the writers that their submissions are not guaranteed payment if the content isn’t right. Then pay your writers $10 per published post to at least pay for their cheese and toast.

Disagree with me? There’s a Facebook page for your rants.

News broke late on Sunday that American news website and blog The Huffington Post would be acquired by AOL. The news has now been confirmed and the agreed price is a reported $315 million ($300 million in cash), expected to close in the late first, or early second quarter 2011.

As part of the deal, Huffington Post Co-founder Arianna Huffington will become president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL. Interestingly, the position will see Arianna Huffington in charge of all of AOL content and other content properties, including gadget blog Engadget and recent AOL acquisition TechCrunch. Judging by the lack of information on TechCrunch’s post about the announcement; most AOL properties may very well have been kept in the dark about the arrival of their new boss.

Arianna Huffington has made her own announcement on the Huffington Post itself where she details how the acquisition took place and the direction of the site moving forward:

When Kenny Lerer and I co-founded The Huffington Post in May 2005, we had high hopes. But even we would have been hard put to predict that less than six years later we would be able to announce a deal that now makes it possible for us to execute our vision at light speed. AOL is an online pioneer that engenders great trust among its 250 million global users. HuffPost is on the cutting edge of creating news that is social and brings with it a distinctive voice and a highly engaged audience. In this case, 1 + 1 = 11. 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.

In an interview with the NY Times on Sunday, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong explained the company’s motivation behind the acquisition:

“The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,”

Huffington Post launched in 2005 with one million in funding. It has since grown to over 200 staff, over 25 million unique monthly visitors and an estimated revenue this year of $60 million.

Are we witnessing the resurgence of AOL as a dominant media player? Or is the resurgence in fact complete? And who will AOL acquire next?

Update: Watch Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong discuss the acquisition on video here.

Update 2: Read AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s internal memo to AOL staff here.