This afternoon it was a little surreal to see a job posting appear among the headlines at TechMeme. Just last week, BusinessWire seemed pretty jazzed about getting press releases to show up there. But really? A job posting?
The job posted at JournalismJobs.com was for an editor’s position at a to-be-created women’s lifestyle website and had a nice, jazzy job description about being able to “explain why Renee Zellweger is endearing yet freaky, and Amy Sedaris is freaky yet brilliant.”
The company isn’t mentioned.
I looked at it, a lot, trying to find a mention of the company. At the bottom, applicants are instructed to respond to a person whose email ends in @aol.com, an address only a few million people could have.
So, not only do I still not know which company is hiring for this position, I still don’t know why it’s showing up on TechMeme. Surely, we’re not going to see every online job posting there, are we?
A refresh later and the link disappears—so I’m guessing the answer to the last question is no—and is replaced with a Media Post story saying AOL was planning to launch a site targeted toward young women. While AOL declined to comment, there was the evidence of it at the job posting at JournalismJobs.com.
So I looked again. Nope. No mention of a company. But Silicon Alley Insider was pretty convinced according to its posting. PaidContent made me feel better by noting the company wasn’t mentioned, and confirmed with Time Warner that the company was planning to launch a complement to the men’s site Asylum.
But there’s no mention of confirmation that the particular job posting was for an AOL project, and AOL still wouldn’t comment on rumors.
I looked again at the job posting, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Nope, just the AOL email address at the bottom. Surely, that wasn’t evidence, right? I looked back at Media Post’s story. Pretty much what I remembered: AOL won’t comment, but there’s a job posting, and Bill Wilson told Bloomberg there’d be more sites this year.
Perhaps Media Post is holding back some sources that weren’t presented. I emailed the person listed at the bottom of the job posting, who didn’t respond to confirm or deny.
Then again, AOL already said they weren’t commenting on it.
I’d have posted this sooner, but that darn journalistic skepticism gets in the way sometimes.
