In the wake of AOL's buying the Huffington Post, the company said Thursday that it will lay off 900 workers. That amounts to cutting 20% of AOL's staff.
AOL spokesman Graham James confirmed to Computerworld that 200 workers from the company's offices in New York and Dulles, Va. will be laid off. The U.S. jobs will be cut in the media and tech areas. James also said 700 people in AOL's offices in India will be let go, although 300 of them will be rehired by Hewlett Packard to work in support services for AOL.
AOL, which has become something of an Internet has-been, is looking to reinvent itself and, as part of that goal, announced early last month that it was purchasing the Huffington Post, which has become the second most popular news Web site in the U.S. after The New York Times .
AOL is reported to have paid $315 million for the Huffington Post.
News of AOL's latest acquisition came just a few months after AOL scooped up technology news publisher TechCrunch and its family of Web sites.
AOL has struggled in recent years, after once being a top dog in the Internet world. In a bid to boost its digital content and drive readers to its sites, the company, which also owns the consumer technology site Engadget, has been buying up online media sites, including the Patch community sites, which focus on local coverage.
Last fall, there was a lot of online buzz that AOL was poised to make an offer to buy Yahoo.
