AOL’s bold new news plan: All Jennifer Aniston, all the time!

Turns out, AOL is not only about to spin off from Time Warner–it’s spinning off from journalism as well! Yep, entering territory unknown, AOL has decided to ditch its editors’ advice and let the googling public decide what stories to post. Even better! The new, rejuvenated AOL will pay the freelancers in their cyber saltmines according to their stories’ popularity with advertisers:

[CEO Tim] Armstrong says he wants to “spark a revolution of people doing content at a different scale.”Rather than relying on editors and journalists deciding on what kinds of stories to run, AOL will employ a system that relies on a series of algorithms that will predict the kinds of stories, videos and photos that will have the greatest appeal to audiences and advertisers….

… The new system will also help determine how much freelancers get paid, as it predicts how much marketers might pay to advertise on a particular article. To make the articles more palatable to marketers, AOL’s system will also screen pieces for grammar, spelling, even plagiarism, before going through a human editor….

AOL promises that advertisers will have no direct role in the editorial content that they sponsor….

AOL plans to Google-ise its news | Media | guardian.co.uk.

There is so much wrong here, it’s hard to know where  to begin. But we might start with “content production,” which apparently differs quite a bit from reporting the facts of the daily news.

Then, let’s talk about what kind of “content” appeals to advertisers. Two words: Happy news! Traditionally, advertisers balk at placing their cereal boxes or new model autos next to stories involving death, disease, war, child endangerment….you get the idea. And who could blame them? Chances are, if you’re viewing a bloody combat photo, you’re not in the mood for Sugar Flakes. So traditionally, editors placed the Sugar Flakes near a giddy celebrity or wholesome family feature, a harmless enough practice that brought in the revenue to report the actual, and unfortunately often unhappy, news.

Of course AOL says that advertisers will have “no direct role” in creating editorial content. Just a chance to control who gets paid to report. And gee, just imagine if a group with a political agenda chose to advertise. Wonder which stories they’d select, and just who they would pay.

I’m sure the real live AOL editors will also be happy to hear that they will soon be supported by robotic checks for grammar and plagiarism. And they will certainly value the “additional guidance on when to run stories about seasonal and cultural events, such as Halloween or Monday Night Football.” But even more exciting for us all is the prospect of all Jennifer Aniston, all the time!

Because isn’t that what news pegged to web searches would yield? Oh, sure you might get the occasional spike in “Afghanistan,” but on a day to day basis, won’t we be looking at celebrity news, chicken for dinner and a dozen creepy little porn requests?