The AOL/Huffington Post deal and business journalism

Here is my interpretation of what AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post for $315 million will mean to the business journalism content of both:

First, the Huffington Post recently hired Peter Goodman from the business desk of the New York Times to be its executive business editor. If Arianna Huffington is going to become editor in chief over all of the combined content, then I would imagine that Goodman might get a similar role above all business and financial content.

Huffington Post was just ramping up its business coverage, but AOL has a lot of business content. It runs sites such as BloggingStocks.com and DailyFinance.com, as well as the personal finance site WalletPop.com. And it also owns the Engadget and Tech Crunch technology news sites. Frankly, AOL’s business news content is meatier than what I’ve seen on Huffington Post.

Goodman’s expertise is in economics coverage. At the Times, he was a national economic correspondent. Given that, it will be interesting to see if the combined operation begins writing more about economics issues.

AOL operated with a strategy where it syndicated its content to other sites as well to increase its traffic. And it had a vice president and general manager of AOL Money & Finance, Small Business, and Education that oversaw all of its business news coverage.

We’ve got an e-mail into Goodman to see what his role will be.