HuffPo to launch UK site this summer

Weeks after cutting 900 employees, AOL will be hiring more in UK for new HuffPo site

Despite all of the twitterpated love-talk that Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong were exchanging in interviews following the announcement of the AOL-Huffington Post merger, it looks like Arianna was interested in more than Tim Armstrong's chiseled jaw and baby blue eyes. She was eyeing his checkbook.

Mere weeks after AOL's acuisition of the Huffington Post was finalized, Huffington and Armstrong on Thursday announced in London that the Huffington Post will be launching a new UK-focused site in the summer. For now, the home-page will be UK-specific, with local stories and links to broader HuffPo content. Eventually, Huffington plans to expand to France and Brazil as well. 

Of course, the Huffington Post brand already reaches a global audience, with some one million readers in the UK, but the new launch will provide more locally specific information.

AOL hired 1,200 journalists last year, 100 of whom were from the UK, so the endeavor may already come partially staffed, but the company believes it will hire additional journalists. This probably won't be welcome news to any of the 900 AOL employees that were laid off earlier this month, 200 of whom were in the editorial department. The layoffs were said to be necessary to make room for the incoming Huffington Post staff. 

As AOL aims to reinvent itself as a content company to offset its ever-shrinking dial-up business, Arianna Huffington has stepped in as a welcome overlord to the company's mountain of recently acquired news sources, including Engadget, TechCrunch, and Patch. Bringing its own 25 million unique monthly users to the table, the Huffington Post is expected to bring AOL's total unique monthly user base to 117 million in the U.S. and 270 million worldwide.

Huffington explained during Thursday's conference that one of the reasons she agreed to sell the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million was the financial freedom it would provide to expand into international markets, including the UK and Canada, as well as producing video. 

Image source: HuffingtonPost.com