AOL News is one of the largest news sites on the Internet, with up to 24 million unique users reading up to 450 million pages each month. The frequency with which these readers return to AOL News, and the amount of time they spend on the site, are at the top of the online news industry.

I have been the director of AOL News since 1999, so I was in charge of the coverage of the war in the Balkans, the Sept. 11 attacks, the explosion of Space Shuttle Columbia and the War in Iraq. I have directed AOL coverage of all elections since 2000. I also am in charge of AOL’s Weather, politics and government areas.

Thomas Friedman, the foreign-affairs columnist for The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in his March 28, 2004, column that he starts his day by reading AOL News:

“I have this routine. I get up every morning around 6 a.m., fire up my computer, call up AOL’s news page and then hold my breath to see what outrage has happened in the world overnight. A massive bombing in Iraq or Madrid? More murderous violence in Israel? A hotel going up in flames in Bali or a synagogue in Istanbul? More U.S. Soldiers killed in Iraq?”  (Awaking to a Dream, March 28, 2004)

Jupiter Research rates AOL News as the overall leader in online news. “… 23 percent of Internet users indicated they consume news from AOL. … AOL News places unmatched focus on fostering a shared experience for members through the deep integration of content with communication features.” (JupiterResearch: News Composite Online Rating of Effectiveness: 2004)

AOL News editors aggregate the “best of journalism’s best” into a one-stop shop of information, multimedia, community and interactivity. We call it “involvement journalism.” AOL members read, watch or listen to the news, join debates and express themselves through polls, message boards, chats and blogs. We exploit the strength of AOL’s huge community of members who want to talk about the news.

We create interactive, multimedia news packages with content from the best organizations in journalism, including:

The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
USA TODAY
CNN
ABC
TIME
The Christian Science Monitor
The Associated Press
Reuters
Agence France Presse

During the 2003 War in Iraq, for example, AOL members

On the day Saddam Hussein was captured, AOL Members watched 2,182,638 video streams. Read more about the highlights of AOL News coverage in 2003.

Read About AOL Election Coverage