• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 31, 2009

Alastair Campbell, who gained prominence as spokesman for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is among the latest contributors hired by AOL, but not on politics. Instead, Campbell will follow the fortunes of his beloved Burnley Football Club for the new UK version of AOL's FanHouse sports site.

The site will focus on English Premier League action with a roster of 15 veteran journalists and writers covering the game and featured sections focusing on upcoming stars, transfer gossip, standings and match results, and a top-performing team of the week.

It won't be the first sports-writing gig undertaken by Campbell, who in 2007 released "The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries," based on the diaries he kept as Blair's Press Secretary from 1994 to 2003. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was a sports reporter for the Tavistock Times in his early career before going on to become a political correspondent for the Daily Mirror in London.

Now he gets to return to the sports beat tracking Burnley in its return to the Premier League. In addition to the new U.K. edition of FanHouse, AOL also launched versions for Germany and France. AOL made FanHouse its main sports property earlier this year, and has continued to expand its content, most recently through the acquisition of mixed martial arts site MMAFighting.com earlier this month.

Separately, AOL has continued to add contributors in other areas including veteran political writer David Corn of Congressional Quarterly for the portal's Politics Daily section launched in April. In a first for AOL, it's also sending David Wood, national security correspondent for PoliticsDaily.com, to Afghanistan to embed with the U.S. Army.

AOL now employs 500 full-time reporters and editors and 1,000 freelancers as part of its strategy to provide original content across scores of specific categories.