The in-progress takeover of AOL by Verizon has left the future of the Huffington Post in doubt. AOL is HuffPo’s parent company, and while Arianna Huffington has unveiled ambitious plans for the site’s future, she is currently between contracts and, according to New York Times sources, isn’t sure if her plans can be realized under the Verizon banner. As an anonymous Huffpo staffer writes at Gawker, words like demoralized are now frequently used to describe the mood in Arianna-land, but, really, it has always been that way: “To anyone who has worked at the site for any period of time, as I have, it’s a little bizarre that people could be more demoralized now than at any point in the past, because the Huffington Post has always been an essentially miserable place.”
At the New Yorker, Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel consider the poetry of jihadists.
Scottish reporter Andrew Jennings has been doggedly investigating corruption at FIFA for more than a decade, helping to set in motion the investigation that resulted in the arrest of top FIFA officials and the resignation of FIFA president Sepp Blatter this week. Jennings told the Washington Post that exposing this kind of malfeasance is actually not very difficult: “This journalism business is easy, you know. You just find some disgraceful, disgustingly corrupt people and you work on it! You have to. That’s what we do. The rest of the media gets far too cozy with them. . . . Our job is to investigate, acquire evidence.”
PEN has announced the presenters for next Monday’s PEN Literary Awards ceremony, which author and artist James Hannaham will host.
At the Times magazine, Adrian Chen reports on the Internet Research Agency, a large, professional organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads propaganda, hoaxes, and misinformation online. As Chen writes of this form of “industrialized trolling,” it is about far more than the small thrill of posting an anonymous nasty comment: “Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.”