Biz: AOL Employee: My experience with them really freaking sucked
- Errors didn’t matter. Grammatical errors — be they major or minor — didn’t matter. The brainless peons who read the website simply wouldn’t notice. What mattered was getting the ‘product’ published.
- Former AOL TV writer Oliver Miller • Describing his experience with writing for the online megacorp in the pre-HuffPo days. Miller, who says that he was overworked and had to plow through dozens of stories each week, lost his job in an interesting way: He made a stupid aside about Alec Baldwin that the actor saw, then wrote a tirade about … on HuffPo. (Miller didn’t name the actor, but the story was well-circulated. We even wrote about it a long time ago.) After that point, he claims, editors intentionally put errors in his pieces. Miller lost his job five months ago, roughly around the time the AOL-HuffPo merger was announced. (Disclosure: I used to do freelance for AOL News pre-merger, and my experience wasn’t like this at all. It was stressful, but that’s only because I was writing a daily news blog and also working a full-time job at the time.) source