Arianna Huffington vs. AOL  

Keach Hagey, at The Wall Street Journal:

Arianna Huffington acknowledged Thursday that her portfolio at AOL Inc. is being scaled back to include only the Huffington Post, undoing a structure put in place when her website was acquired by AOL last year.

After buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL gave Ms. Huffington editorial oversight of all its properties, including tech-news site TechCrunch, the patch.com network of local news sites, MovieFone and MapQuest.

First, Engadget’s editor left. Then, some of Engadget’s writers left. After some incredibly damaging–and very public–fighting, Michael Arrington was fired. Yes, the most powerful man in tech journalism was fired from a company that is trying to become the future of journalism. In the months that have followed, practically the entire TechCrunch team has left.

People don’t get in the lifeboats unless they think the ship is sinking. Something was clearly wrong at AOL. But nothing was done. It made no sense to me, but it appeared from the outside that AOL was willingly making absurd sacrifices that led its own employees to abandon ship.

It can be hard to come to terms with the fact that something you bought doesn’t meet your expectations, especially if that thing is expensive. But when you’re the CEO of a company, it’s your job to see through that. Sunk costs are sunk. It takes good leadership to identify trends and seize them. It takes great leadership to fail fast, to recognize when you’ve made a mistake, and to reverse your decisions before any serious damage is done.

 
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