This is an interesting article. Contains a lot of information that I didn't know. I'm still trying to figure out the long play on Verizon's purchases.. AT&T's seem more obvious to me than Verizon's.
Can Oath, the Arranged Media Marriage of Yahoo and AOL, Avoid a Rough Divorce?
Can two once-great Internet behemoths come together harmoniously in an age of mergers, roll-ups, and distribution plays? The early returns suggests that Oath has some work cut out for itself.
by
August 16, 2017 1:58 pm
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Tim Armstrong speaks during Via Technology at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on June 16th.
By Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images.
“How do you take two things that are already ****ed up and put them together and expect it to work?” This is how one media executive recently described the formation of Oath—the corporate marriage of AOL and Yahoo, two humbled behemoths of the first Internet Age, that were recently united through Verizon’s $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s surviving properties this spring. The executive, who used to work at one of those properties, espoused the general skepticism that has prevailed throughout large swaths of media circles since early April, when AOL C.E.O. Tim Armstrong announced the name of a new parent company encompassing an agglomeration of media and technology assets, including HuffPost, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch, Tumblr, and numerous other well-known (Flickr, Engadget) and lesser-known (Style Me Pretty, Cambio) brands.
On Twitter, Armstrong emphasized the vast reach of Oath: “Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” But it didn’t take long before many began formulating a less-rosy projection. On some level, Oath was greeted as the latest in a long line of lamentable media rebrandings. (See also Tronc, Tegna, Splinter.) But, more profoundly, the move also seemed to foreshadow a potential power struggle between two once-swaggering content giants, both coming to terms with their new reality in the modern era of media retrenchment, mergers, roll-ups, and distribution plays.
For both, Oath is a humbling outcome. During the past decade, Yahoo has endured numerous leadership shake-ups, P.R. disasters, high-profile strategic flubs, and bellicose shareholder activism. That was all supposed to end, of course, upon Marissa Mayer’s ascendance as C.E.O. She was even greeted at Yahoo’s corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, with images of her face adorned on Shep Fairey-style Hope posters. Mayer subsequently embarked on a hiring spree that landed her, among other bold-faced names, Katie Couric, Joe Zee, Bobbi Brown, and David Pogue, but she never appeared able to execute a coherent media strategy. In the end, her push to build a suite of premium digital “magazines” powered by A-list bylines didn’t shake out as planned. As my colleague Sarah Ellison has noted, Yahoo’s biggest names often suffered as their expensive work competed for clicks with algorithmic searches for pictures of Kim Kardashian’s derriere. Advertisers were lukewarm, and half of the verticals launched under Mayer were shut down.
Meanwhile, AOL’s much-heralded $315 million acquisition of Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post in 2011 ordained an auspicious future for the Web site, recently rebranded as HuffPost. “I think this is going to be a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 11,” Armstrong told The New York Times back then. There was a period of glory as the Internet’s most-famous aggregator began to professionalize, loading up on marquee reporters and editors to compete with legacy stalwarts. But its push into serious journalism eventually washed up in a sea of defections and an obsession with traffic-friendly lifestyle and health coverage. Within a few years, AOL was sold to Verizon, HuffPost was absorbed as a corporate division of a telecom company, and its illustrious founder departed to embark on a wellness venture called Thrive Global. HuffPost is now transitioning yet again, with a fresh round of investment under the new editorial leadership of New York Times alumna Lydia Polgreen, who’s brought some journalistic swagger back to the site by refashioning it as a sort of digital tabloid for the Trump age.
In some ways, by the time of Armstrong’s tweet, Yahoo’s roll-up of media brands and AOL’s flagship powerhouse media destination seemed perfect for each other—recently chastened victims of splashy media divorces in search of a new identity. The question, of course, was whether they would accept their arranged marriage, and what Oath would end up looking like.
Four-and-a-half months since Oath’s unveiling, the answer has begun to come into focus. The combined company is still nursing wounds from the culling of 15 percent of the Yahoo-AOL workforce. Pink slips were handed out to 2,100 employees in mid-June, 39 of them journalists from HuffPost. The casualties included David Wood, a veteran reporter who earned HuffPost its first, and so far only, Pulitzer Prize. “It’s been the hardest day I’ve had helping run this operation,” Sam Stein tweeted with regard to HuffPost’s Washington bureau, which lost six reporters. (Stein stepped down as HuffPost’s longtime senior politics editor several weeks later. He’s now at The Daily Beast.)
Perhaps the most-famous Oath departure was Couric. Hired in 2014 as Yahoo’s global news anchor and reportedly making $10 million a year, the former Today and CBS Evening News star wanted to concentrate on doing more of the long-form video series and deep interviews that are her stock-in-trade. Oath’s video unit, however, had begun doubling down on the type of highly shareable, “snackable” bites that people gobble up on their smartphones and Facebook feeds. Couric was offered something in the low seven figures to extend her contract through the end of the year, three sources familiar with the matter told me. But in the end, it didn’t feel as if the two sides were in sync, and they agreed to work together going forward on a per-project basis. (It’s also worth noting that the post-merger culling claimed about half of Couric’s team.) Whatever Couric does next, presumably she’ll want it to come with more marketing support and greater visibility. What frustrates her like nothing else, two people close to Couric told me, is when she encounters fans and they ask her what she’s up to these days.
Couric isn’t the only significant editorial hire from the Mayer era who declined, as it were, to take the Oath. There’s also Martha Nelson, a former top Time Inc. editor who was aggressively recruited by Mayer to oversee Yahoo’s media division, and Megan Liberman, a New York Times alumna who spent the past four years as editor in chief of Yahoo News. Both were offered roles in the new company but decided to move on.
The rest of their former colleagues are now commingling at Oath’s recently completed corporate headquarters at 770 Broadway, AOL’s longtime nerve center. The building’s 75,000-square-foot ninth floor—home to Armstrong and his New York-based executive team, as well as lots of rank-and-file AOL and Yahoo folks who were in the process of moving from Times Square when I visited this week—was built from scratch in a lavish style befitting the most millennial-friendly workplaces. A prolific selection of lounge areas and huddle rooms suggested the vibe of a living room on an HGTV show, with sleek, West Elmesque furniture and decor. There were lots of grays, browns, blacks, exposed ductwork, hardwood floors, glossy indoor plants, soft lighting that spills out of chic glass fixtures dangling from the ceiling, color-coordinated arrangements of classic literature and other hardcover books. There’s an upscale coffee bar and a tap serving Stella Artois, as well as gallery-like installations of AOL and Yahoo artifacts. There are portable hammocks scattered around the open-concept bull pens, lest anyone should feel they’ve been working too hard. Other office floors are being redesigned as well, and Oath slogans have been slapped on the walls throughout the whole place—“Build brands people love”; “Our power is our brands,” you get the picture. On the fifth floor, there’s a photo booth where employees can take selfies with an instant camera, scribble down their personal “Oaths,” and affix them to a giant bulletin board. (Armstrong’s Oath, for the record: “Never give up.”)
From left; by John Lamparski/Getty Images, by Paul Morigi/WireImage, by Jeff Vespa/Getty Images, by Patrick McMullan/Getty Images, by Jemal Countess/WireImage, by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images.
The merger is as much about creating a new corporate culture through reimagined physical space as it is about importing some of Yahoo’s Silicon Valley-centric ethos to Oath’s center of gravity in New York City. This idea is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the food. Free meals are considered a must-have perk and recruiting tool for technology companies, not that the handsomely paid denizens of Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Cupertino can’t afford a trip to Chipotle. The problem is, however, there is no cafeteria at 770 Broadway; Armstrong’s team is building one that’s expected to open sometime next year. Temporary solution? Daily pop-up catering on three separate floors from the likes of Masala Kitchen, Jack’s Sliders and Sushi, and Fresh & Co. “I can’t overstate the importance of the food in this merger,” an Oath employee told me. “During a year-and-a-half of talks, some question about free food was asked at pretty much every information session, and Marni [Walden, Verizon’s top media executive] and Tim repeatedly found themselves assuring Yahoo-ers that the free food would continue.” (Silicon Valley types might tell you about how sharing free lunch fosters collaboration and teamwork. Cynical New Yorkers, while they’re hardly complaining about the new perk, are more likely to grumble about the golden-handcuffs effect of keeping people chained to the office all day, or how they’d rather see the money spent on hiring more journalists.)
The fancy digs and generous amenities may seem nice, but they won’t necessarily aid in the biggest challenge surrounding Oath, which is not about whether two older assets can be rolled together in harmony. Instead, it seems to be about whether their corporate overlord can actually make use of them. Leaving aside the punishing economics of digital media, the $4.5 billion question is how Verizon, which controls so many phones, can use the array of media now in its possession to boost the margins of a competitive wireless business. Furthermore, is there something within those media brands that’s powerful and compelling enough for Verizon to preload it onto the home screen of its tens of millions of mobile devices? “That is the holy grail,” a media executive who is intimately familiar with the Oath businesses told me. “They do not make that decision lightly. Everything that goes there is about engaging consumers, having them like the product more so they spend more minutes on it and extend their Verizon subscriptions. If you’re, say, AT&T”—which is counting down the days until its merger with Time Warner is approved—“you don’t have to think hard about putting HBO or CNN on your first screen. The question on the Verizon side is, do you have something from this merger than you actually feel good enough about?”
Verizon’s intention to pump resources into Oath to bolster the parent company’s core business has created some optimism. “I don’t see any reason why this won’t work,” Andy Serwer, the editor in chief of Yahoo Finance, told me. “We have the investment and the commitment to make it work.” On a more practical level, following months of chaos and uncertainty about the Verizon deal and whether it would even happen, “there’s some relief,” said Serwer. “There’s a feeling of, O.K., we’re moving forward finally. So people definitely feel a lot better about their circumstances.”
Others, however, are more skeptical. Insiders I spoke with described an emerging fault line that can be summed up in a metaphor kicked around by Simon Khalaf, a longtime product guy who joined Yahoo in 2014 when it acquired his mobile ad-tech company, and who now oversees all of Oath’s media brands. It goes like this: “We want deejays, not musicians.”
On one side, the deejays are out to disrupt content consumption, to build a mega platform fueled by the deluge of stories and videos pouring forth from Oath’s firehose of digital publications that can compete with the social media titans of the world. On the other side, the musicians want first and foremost to become ever more ambitious and innovative and well resourced when it comes to journalism and storytelling. These two missions aren’t mutually exclusive, but the musicians are nonetheless apprehensive about the deejays—not to mention, as one musician put it, the anxiety that tends to accompany working at a place with layers of management that doesn’t include content or journalism people.
Another challenge has been fusing AOL and Yahoo’s very different management structures. It’s an exercise that inevitably encourages the reading of tea leaves—who’s up and who’s down, in which direction is the power and influence shifting? Within Oath’s media division, insiders I spoke with have their eyes on the relationship between Khalaf and another key executive, Jared Grusd, C.E.O. of HuffPost and, as of June, global head of news and information at Oath. The merger gave Grusd—who was an AOL executive earlier in his career, in addition to holding high-ranking positions at Google and Spotify—an expanded remit, putting him in charge of Yahoo News and the Yahoo and AOL homepages, in addition to his role overseeing HuffPost since 2015. But some insiders saw a bit of wind being taken out of his sails. Sources familiar with the matter told me Grusd was in the running for the more senior position of head of media brands and products, but that job ended up going to Khalaf, who works out of the company’s Sunnyvale offices on the erstwhile Yahoo campus, and to whom Grusd now reports. Previously, Grusd had reported directly to Armstrong. “These guys would both publicly deny it, but there’s a tension,” a person who knows both of them said.
Indeed, Grusd vigorously disputed that characterization. “We’ve had an awesome relationship since the first day we met each other,” he told me. “He and I don’t have any friction whatsoever. Anytime you go through an acquisition of this scale, there’s a point in time where you have to figure out all the different swim lanes.” Grusd also put to rest speculation about the future of Yahoo News. Employees I spoke with from both the Yahoo and HuffPost sides questioned whether the much-smaller Yahoo News team might eventually get absorbed by the larger HuffPost, which presumably wouldn’t mind adding high-profile writers like Michael Isikoff, Matt Bai, and Lisa Belkin (herself a HuffPost alum) to its ranks. “The feeling is that it will eventually occur to everyone that that’s what makes sense,” someone on the Yahoo side told me. Grusd said, “There are no active conversations to do that, and there haven’t been active conversations to do that.”
In the end, as Oath’s employees gorge on snacks and artisanal coffee, and as they inevitably endure the pangs germane to media mergers, the most pressing question may come down to something simple: identity. After employees endured years of variously changing strategies, and posited existential questions about what HuffPost or Yahoo News should be, one thing is increasingly clear. Though they now work for Oath, they really work for Verizon. And, in this age of distributed media, how well they perform for their corporate parent will determine whether they get to survive.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/201...mstrong-aol-yahoo-verizon-avoid-rough-divorce
Can Oath, the Arranged Media Marriage of Yahoo and AOL, Avoid a Rough Divorce?
Can two once-great Internet behemoths come together harmoniously in an age of mergers, roll-ups, and distribution plays? The early returns suggests that Oath has some work cut out for itself.
by
August 16, 2017 1:58 pm
Tim Armstrong speaks during Via Technology at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on June 16th.
By Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images.
“How do you take two things that are already ****ed up and put them together and expect it to work?” This is how one media executive recently described the formation of Oath—the corporate marriage of AOL and Yahoo, two humbled behemoths of the first Internet Age, that were recently united through Verizon’s $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s surviving properties this spring. The executive, who used to work at one of those properties, espoused the general skepticism that has prevailed throughout large swaths of media circles since early April, when AOL C.E.O. Tim Armstrong announced the name of a new parent company encompassing an agglomeration of media and technology assets, including HuffPost, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch, Tumblr, and numerous other well-known (Flickr, Engadget) and lesser-known (Style Me Pretty, Cambio) brands.
On Twitter, Armstrong emphasized the vast reach of Oath: “Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” But it didn’t take long before many began formulating a less-rosy projection. On some level, Oath was greeted as the latest in a long line of lamentable media rebrandings. (See also Tronc, Tegna, Splinter.) But, more profoundly, the move also seemed to foreshadow a potential power struggle between two once-swaggering content giants, both coming to terms with their new reality in the modern era of media retrenchment, mergers, roll-ups, and distribution plays.
For both, Oath is a humbling outcome. During the past decade, Yahoo has endured numerous leadership shake-ups, P.R. disasters, high-profile strategic flubs, and bellicose shareholder activism. That was all supposed to end, of course, upon Marissa Mayer’s ascendance as C.E.O. She was even greeted at Yahoo’s corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, with images of her face adorned on Shep Fairey-style Hope posters. Mayer subsequently embarked on a hiring spree that landed her, among other bold-faced names, Katie Couric, Joe Zee, Bobbi Brown, and David Pogue, but she never appeared able to execute a coherent media strategy. In the end, her push to build a suite of premium digital “magazines” powered by A-list bylines didn’t shake out as planned. As my colleague Sarah Ellison has noted, Yahoo’s biggest names often suffered as their expensive work competed for clicks with algorithmic searches for pictures of Kim Kardashian’s derriere. Advertisers were lukewarm, and half of the verticals launched under Mayer were shut down.
Meanwhile, AOL’s much-heralded $315 million acquisition of Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post in 2011 ordained an auspicious future for the Web site, recently rebranded as HuffPost. “I think this is going to be a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 11,” Armstrong told The New York Times back then. There was a period of glory as the Internet’s most-famous aggregator began to professionalize, loading up on marquee reporters and editors to compete with legacy stalwarts. But its push into serious journalism eventually washed up in a sea of defections and an obsession with traffic-friendly lifestyle and health coverage. Within a few years, AOL was sold to Verizon, HuffPost was absorbed as a corporate division of a telecom company, and its illustrious founder departed to embark on a wellness venture called Thrive Global. HuffPost is now transitioning yet again, with a fresh round of investment under the new editorial leadership of New York Times alumna Lydia Polgreen, who’s brought some journalistic swagger back to the site by refashioning it as a sort of digital tabloid for the Trump age.
In some ways, by the time of Armstrong’s tweet, Yahoo’s roll-up of media brands and AOL’s flagship powerhouse media destination seemed perfect for each other—recently chastened victims of splashy media divorces in search of a new identity. The question, of course, was whether they would accept their arranged marriage, and what Oath would end up looking like.
Four-and-a-half months since Oath’s unveiling, the answer has begun to come into focus. The combined company is still nursing wounds from the culling of 15 percent of the Yahoo-AOL workforce. Pink slips were handed out to 2,100 employees in mid-June, 39 of them journalists from HuffPost. The casualties included David Wood, a veteran reporter who earned HuffPost its first, and so far only, Pulitzer Prize. “It’s been the hardest day I’ve had helping run this operation,” Sam Stein tweeted with regard to HuffPost’s Washington bureau, which lost six reporters. (Stein stepped down as HuffPost’s longtime senior politics editor several weeks later. He’s now at The Daily Beast.)
Perhaps the most-famous Oath departure was Couric. Hired in 2014 as Yahoo’s global news anchor and reportedly making $10 million a year, the former Today and CBS Evening News star wanted to concentrate on doing more of the long-form video series and deep interviews that are her stock-in-trade. Oath’s video unit, however, had begun doubling down on the type of highly shareable, “snackable” bites that people gobble up on their smartphones and Facebook feeds. Couric was offered something in the low seven figures to extend her contract through the end of the year, three sources familiar with the matter told me. But in the end, it didn’t feel as if the two sides were in sync, and they agreed to work together going forward on a per-project basis. (It’s also worth noting that the post-merger culling claimed about half of Couric’s team.) Whatever Couric does next, presumably she’ll want it to come with more marketing support and greater visibility. What frustrates her like nothing else, two people close to Couric told me, is when she encounters fans and they ask her what she’s up to these days.
Couric isn’t the only significant editorial hire from the Mayer era who declined, as it were, to take the Oath. There’s also Martha Nelson, a former top Time Inc. editor who was aggressively recruited by Mayer to oversee Yahoo’s media division, and Megan Liberman, a New York Times alumna who spent the past four years as editor in chief of Yahoo News. Both were offered roles in the new company but decided to move on.
The rest of their former colleagues are now commingling at Oath’s recently completed corporate headquarters at 770 Broadway, AOL’s longtime nerve center. The building’s 75,000-square-foot ninth floor—home to Armstrong and his New York-based executive team, as well as lots of rank-and-file AOL and Yahoo folks who were in the process of moving from Times Square when I visited this week—was built from scratch in a lavish style befitting the most millennial-friendly workplaces. A prolific selection of lounge areas and huddle rooms suggested the vibe of a living room on an HGTV show, with sleek, West Elmesque furniture and decor. There were lots of grays, browns, blacks, exposed ductwork, hardwood floors, glossy indoor plants, soft lighting that spills out of chic glass fixtures dangling from the ceiling, color-coordinated arrangements of classic literature and other hardcover books. There’s an upscale coffee bar and a tap serving Stella Artois, as well as gallery-like installations of AOL and Yahoo artifacts. There are portable hammocks scattered around the open-concept bull pens, lest anyone should feel they’ve been working too hard. Other office floors are being redesigned as well, and Oath slogans have been slapped on the walls throughout the whole place—“Build brands people love”; “Our power is our brands,” you get the picture. On the fifth floor, there’s a photo booth where employees can take selfies with an instant camera, scribble down their personal “Oaths,” and affix them to a giant bulletin board. (Armstrong’s Oath, for the record: “Never give up.”)
From left; by John Lamparski/Getty Images, by Paul Morigi/WireImage, by Jeff Vespa/Getty Images, by Patrick McMullan/Getty Images, by Jemal Countess/WireImage, by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images.
The merger is as much about creating a new corporate culture through reimagined physical space as it is about importing some of Yahoo’s Silicon Valley-centric ethos to Oath’s center of gravity in New York City. This idea is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the food. Free meals are considered a must-have perk and recruiting tool for technology companies, not that the handsomely paid denizens of Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Cupertino can’t afford a trip to Chipotle. The problem is, however, there is no cafeteria at 770 Broadway; Armstrong’s team is building one that’s expected to open sometime next year. Temporary solution? Daily pop-up catering on three separate floors from the likes of Masala Kitchen, Jack’s Sliders and Sushi, and Fresh & Co. “I can’t overstate the importance of the food in this merger,” an Oath employee told me. “During a year-and-a-half of talks, some question about free food was asked at pretty much every information session, and Marni [Walden, Verizon’s top media executive] and Tim repeatedly found themselves assuring Yahoo-ers that the free food would continue.” (Silicon Valley types might tell you about how sharing free lunch fosters collaboration and teamwork. Cynical New Yorkers, while they’re hardly complaining about the new perk, are more likely to grumble about the golden-handcuffs effect of keeping people chained to the office all day, or how they’d rather see the money spent on hiring more journalists.)
The fancy digs and generous amenities may seem nice, but they won’t necessarily aid in the biggest challenge surrounding Oath, which is not about whether two older assets can be rolled together in harmony. Instead, it seems to be about whether their corporate overlord can actually make use of them. Leaving aside the punishing economics of digital media, the $4.5 billion question is how Verizon, which controls so many phones, can use the array of media now in its possession to boost the margins of a competitive wireless business. Furthermore, is there something within those media brands that’s powerful and compelling enough for Verizon to preload it onto the home screen of its tens of millions of mobile devices? “That is the holy grail,” a media executive who is intimately familiar with the Oath businesses told me. “They do not make that decision lightly. Everything that goes there is about engaging consumers, having them like the product more so they spend more minutes on it and extend their Verizon subscriptions. If you’re, say, AT&T”—which is counting down the days until its merger with Time Warner is approved—“you don’t have to think hard about putting HBO or CNN on your first screen. The question on the Verizon side is, do you have something from this merger than you actually feel good enough about?”
Verizon’s intention to pump resources into Oath to bolster the parent company’s core business has created some optimism. “I don’t see any reason why this won’t work,” Andy Serwer, the editor in chief of Yahoo Finance, told me. “We have the investment and the commitment to make it work.” On a more practical level, following months of chaos and uncertainty about the Verizon deal and whether it would even happen, “there’s some relief,” said Serwer. “There’s a feeling of, O.K., we’re moving forward finally. So people definitely feel a lot better about their circumstances.”
Others, however, are more skeptical. Insiders I spoke with described an emerging fault line that can be summed up in a metaphor kicked around by Simon Khalaf, a longtime product guy who joined Yahoo in 2014 when it acquired his mobile ad-tech company, and who now oversees all of Oath’s media brands. It goes like this: “We want deejays, not musicians.”
On one side, the deejays are out to disrupt content consumption, to build a mega platform fueled by the deluge of stories and videos pouring forth from Oath’s firehose of digital publications that can compete with the social media titans of the world. On the other side, the musicians want first and foremost to become ever more ambitious and innovative and well resourced when it comes to journalism and storytelling. These two missions aren’t mutually exclusive, but the musicians are nonetheless apprehensive about the deejays—not to mention, as one musician put it, the anxiety that tends to accompany working at a place with layers of management that doesn’t include content or journalism people.
Another challenge has been fusing AOL and Yahoo’s very different management structures. It’s an exercise that inevitably encourages the reading of tea leaves—who’s up and who’s down, in which direction is the power and influence shifting? Within Oath’s media division, insiders I spoke with have their eyes on the relationship between Khalaf and another key executive, Jared Grusd, C.E.O. of HuffPost and, as of June, global head of news and information at Oath. The merger gave Grusd—who was an AOL executive earlier in his career, in addition to holding high-ranking positions at Google and Spotify—an expanded remit, putting him in charge of Yahoo News and the Yahoo and AOL homepages, in addition to his role overseeing HuffPost since 2015. But some insiders saw a bit of wind being taken out of his sails. Sources familiar with the matter told me Grusd was in the running for the more senior position of head of media brands and products, but that job ended up going to Khalaf, who works out of the company’s Sunnyvale offices on the erstwhile Yahoo campus, and to whom Grusd now reports. Previously, Grusd had reported directly to Armstrong. “These guys would both publicly deny it, but there’s a tension,” a person who knows both of them said.
Indeed, Grusd vigorously disputed that characterization. “We’ve had an awesome relationship since the first day we met each other,” he told me. “He and I don’t have any friction whatsoever. Anytime you go through an acquisition of this scale, there’s a point in time where you have to figure out all the different swim lanes.” Grusd also put to rest speculation about the future of Yahoo News. Employees I spoke with from both the Yahoo and HuffPost sides questioned whether the much-smaller Yahoo News team might eventually get absorbed by the larger HuffPost, which presumably wouldn’t mind adding high-profile writers like Michael Isikoff, Matt Bai, and Lisa Belkin (herself a HuffPost alum) to its ranks. “The feeling is that it will eventually occur to everyone that that’s what makes sense,” someone on the Yahoo side told me. Grusd said, “There are no active conversations to do that, and there haven’t been active conversations to do that.”
In the end, as Oath’s employees gorge on snacks and artisanal coffee, and as they inevitably endure the pangs germane to media mergers, the most pressing question may come down to something simple: identity. After employees endured years of variously changing strategies, and posited existential questions about what HuffPost or Yahoo News should be, one thing is increasingly clear. Though they now work for Oath, they really work for Verizon. And, in this age of distributed media, how well they perform for their corporate parent will determine whether they get to survive.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/201...mstrong-aol-yahoo-verizon-avoid-rough-divorce
