AOL Feels Pressure. Halts Some Blogs.

The Washington Post has obtained an internal memo from Weblogs Inc, part of the AOL Group. The notice asks bloggers at Diylife.com, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and DownloadSquad to cease blogging due to budget overages.

1) That’s kind of scary that they can’t afford to publish a week’s worth of posts.

2) On second thought, how much are these folks making per post?!

Here’s the memo:

“Hi Teams. I’ve spoken to your respective leads about some budget concerns, but wanted to pass along one more last-minute (and unfortunate) effort: we must halt any new posting on the blogs through next Thursday, July 31. There may be some exceptions, and not all blogs will be paused in the same manner.”

The goal is to safeguard against further budget overages, thus protecting our business and hopefully continuing as usual (though maybe a little restrained) in August. Going forward we will remain slightly leaner, but my hope is that by the end of the year we’ll continue to ramp up as we have historically.

You may see posts get rescheduled to account for the change, and if you have larger features those should not be published until August. Sorry about that, and very sorry about the unintended shortfall of income for all of you. Again, the long view is to return to normal as we re-align with our original budget estimates.

I’m here all day for questions and concerns, on this lists or off. Again, I know this is difficult and will cause some worry.

As of now the only blog to be put on hiatus after this month is DIY Life, effective August 1 (DIY Life could be resurrected at some point, but that is out of my hands). Everyone else should make plans for a resumption in a week. DLS bloggers should immediately press pause on new content. TUAW can continue with 1 or 2 App Store posts a day.

Thanks in advance everyone, we’ll get through this an emerge stronger, I know it.”