By John Nichols

As a new era of media mergers and acquisitions unfolds—in the aftermath of the federal approval of the Comcast/NBCU deal—AOL’s $315-million purchase of Huffington Post ought not come as a surprise.

Media companies, old and new, are rethinking and repositioning in order to grab pieces of a future that will be more digital and less analog, more dynamic and less ponderous, more opinonated and less obsessed with a balance that never was achieved. But this is about a lot more than AOL and Huffington Post. Indeed, it’s about a lot more than media companies and their millions—make that billions. This deal and arrangements like it approach fundamental questions of producing journalism when traditional sources are revenue are drying up, and go to the heart of much broader debates about how citizens will get the information they need to engage in a democratic process that is now far from functional.

Huffington Post, with 25 million monthly visitors, seems to “get” the new age. And AOL, now delinked from the Time-Warner omnibus, is looking to brand itself as the content source for news junkies in a twenty-first century that will have fewer newspapers and traditional broadcast news sources and more digital destinations. It’s been a struggle, and AOL has lost a lot of money in recent years. The company was looking for a bold move

Read Full Article Here.