AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is vying for a new title — America’s worst boss.
Armstrong apparently freaked out and fired an employee who tried to take a photo of him yesterday during a morning meeting to outline drastic cutbacks at his struggling Patch local-news network.
During a conference call with Patch editors, Armstrong said he would pull the plug or find partners for 400 of the division’s 900 websites as AOL reasserts its authority over the money-losing “hyperlocal” venture.
Several minutes into the call, an employee identified as Creative Director Abel Lenz reportedly tried to snap a picture of Armstrong, who was in the New York office.
“Abel, put that camera down. You’re fired,” Armstrong said, according to TechCrunch, a website that is also owned by AOL.
A few minutes later, Armstrong returned to the subject of the firing, saying, “The reason I fired Abel is I don’t want anyone taking pictures of this meeting.”
He likened it to a sports team’s locker room, adding that he couldn’t have people “giving the game plan away,” according to Business Insider’s account of the call.
Lenz could not be reached for comment. As of yesterday, he had not changed his profile on LinkedIn, where he is still listed as Patch’s creative director, but calls to the AOL switchboard said they had no employee by that name.
Armstrong also had some harsh words for the division’s president, Steve Kalin, whom he had apparently just canned.
“Something at Patch has been missing and missing for some time. That’s leadership — leadership with a capital ‘L,’ ” he said during the call, according to TechCrunch.
Calls to Armstrong and AOL representatives were not returned.
Armstrong was the biggest backer of Patch when it was founded in 2007. The former top Google executive sold it to AOL for $7 million in 2009, shortly after he became CEO of AOL, and considered it key to his efforts to reinvent AOL after a decade of steady decline.
In some towns, Patch sites have become quite popular as go-to destinations for political, youth-sports and local news. In others, the small staff and infrequent updates rendered the sites seldom-visited cyber ghost-towns.
By some estimates, AOL has spent more than $300 million on Patch since 2009, and it has yet to turn a profit.
In a call with analysts last week, AOL’s chief operating officer, Karen Dykstra, said the days of wild spending are over.
“Patch has been our most visible spending area and we are significantly reducing our investment in Patch,” she said.
Armstrong conceded that it would be “tough” for at least a third of the sites to turn a profit. He said the company was going to either close those sites or seek print media partners for 300 to 400 of them.
“Partnerships are one piece of it,” said Armstrong.
So are radical reductions in staff, which are expected to number in the hundreds, as Armstrong comes under pressure from the AOL board to bring Patch to profitability by the fourth quarter. Armstrong said those cuts will be revealed over the next seven days.