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    Categories: Culture

What’s the Future for AOL and Yahoo?

This has been a very rough week for the two Internet pioneers, Yahoo and AOL. Yahoo’s fiery chief executive Carol Bartz was fired over the phone (who would have the guts to say it to her face?), and co-founder Jerry Yang is taking a role in rethinking the company’s direction (again). And at AOL, CEO Tim Armstrong has had to deal with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington starting a venture fund, and his media chief Arianna Huffington calling for Arrington’s dismissal. Even worse, AOL’s big Project Devil ad push has stalled, with few publishers taking up the larger ad format.

So take out your crystal ball and tell us what will happen for these old school Net companies trying to turn their tankers around. Who will survive and who will flame out? Should they just merge and get it over with? Vote in our poll and share your long-form thoughts in the comments below.

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

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