AOL buys the Huffington Post for $315 million

If you were starting to get worried that between Tina Brown's recent merger of The Daily Beast with Newsweek and Rupert Murdoch's much-hyped launch of iPad newspaper The Daily, Arianna Huffington might not be getting enough attention these days, you can rest easy: Huffington announced on Sunday that her hugely successful site The Huffington Post has been sold to AOL for a whopping $315 million dollars. After months of private talks with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Huffington has signed on to serve as president and editor-in-chief of what will henceforth be known as the Huffington Post Media Group, giving her oversight of not only AOL's entire national and local news outfits, but its other media enterprises (Mapquest, Moviefone) as well.

So what does the deal mean exactly? Increased visibility and an even more massive scope of power for Huffington and her popular but niche site, and much-needed media cred as a news site people actually bother to read (and that advertisers bother to pursue) for AOL. And that Huffington is one step closer to actually just buying the internet.