• Tech Crunch, Monday, March 7, 2011 11:11 AM

Just like that, AOL on Monday officially closed its $315 acquisition of Huffington Post. "Well that was fast," notes TechCrunch. "The deal was originally announced on February 6, so it's taken a month for the acquisition to close."  AOL is also announcing the hiring of a half-dozen journalists to its new Huffington Post Media Group unit -- "a clear sign of the shift in its focus toward a more editorially driven direction under the now-official content head Arianna Huffington," writes Boomtown's Kara Swisher.

Sure to ruffle Rupert Murdoch's feathers, Huffington's Media Group has reportedly poached Jon Ward, the Washington bureau chief for New Corp.'s just-launched online newspaper The Daily. "His leap marks the first high profile departure from Murdoch's much-anticipated online venture, which is still struggling to establish a foothold," according to Business Insider.

Along with additional hires via the Huffington Post's Jefferson Program for Young Journalists, sources tells Swisher that the new hires are only the beginning. "With the acquisition, AOL is buying into the new publishing model that the Huffington Post represents," TechCrunch adds.  Armstrong has said that the "driving factors behind the deal is how well the Huffington Post fits into the content platform he is trying to build, particularly around women, influencers, and local (his 80-80-80 strategy)." Also, "The deal should give AOL a user base of 117 million monthly unique visitors," according to Fortune.

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