AOL Daily Finance’s 2011 staff reboot — Peter Goodman, HuffPo, and a long arc

By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive →

In late May 2011 Peter Goodman — recently elevated to Executive Business Editor of the merged AOL Huffington Post Media Group — announced a substantial staff reboot at AOL Daily Finance.

Then

The AOL-HuffPo merger had closed in March 2011 for $315 million, putting Arianna Huffington in charge of the combined editorial operation. Goodman’s approach was to bring in his staff of choice. Three of AOL Daily Finance’s eight new hires came directly from his orbit.

Now

The AOL-HuffPo experiment turned out to be substantially less durable than the 2011 reboot implied. The Daily Finance brand was eventually wound down. AOL was acquired by Verizon in 2015 for $4.4 billion; Yahoo joined as Oath in 2017; Verizon Media was then sold to private equity in 2021. HuffPost was sold to BuzzFeed in 2020. Peter Goodman returned to the New York Times after his AOL tenure and has continued there as one of the paper’s senior international business reporters.

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