You've Got Fail

We're regular readers - okay, skimmers - of the Huffington Post, because we love busty celebrities and strange little news-of-the-weird items as much as anyone else does. But that doesn't mean we don't think of it as a sensationalistic page-view generator with about as much relationship to actual journalism as, well, Burro Hall. Case in point - which we've bitched about before - is HuffPo's Mexico Big News Page, whose coverage of Mexico runs the gamut from Horribly Mutilated Bodies Discovered In Mexico to Brutally Mutilated Bodies Discovered In Mexico (yes, those are actually two different stories).

Between those two poles we get such headlines as Mexican Drug War: 10 Shocking Facts; Mexico Drug War's Deadliest 2010 Attacks (GRAPHIC PHOTOS); Mexican Drug Lords Importing Beauty Queens and Mexican Pop Star's Rape Allegations Grip Mexico. None of this is inaccurate, per se, but it hardly ads up to a nuanced and in-depth portrait of our neighbor to the south.

But hey, porn sells, and so we were not surprised to read that AOL has gobbled HP up for a third-of-a-billion dollars.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation...Arianna Huffington will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises...

Anyway, for reasons having to do with the fact that they never bill us, we sometimes use AOL Mail despite its being the shittiest service since CompuServe went under. We log on today to the New, Improved HuffPoAOL, and what do we see?

We guess when someone's paying you $300 million, you get right to work.