A email this morning from the HuffPost doyenne herself broke the news: AOL is acquiring the Huffington Post for a cool $350M. Not bad. Or, on second thought….

Arianna, in her email, assures us that HuffPost will continue on course:

Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be, for HuffPost, like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.

I have problems stepping onto a moving walkway at the airport, myself. Arianna, I think you’d better watch your step! And I’m pretty sure that the guy who drives a supersonic jet doesn’t call it a “wheel”. And speed is not the highest good.

HuffPost has, overall, been good more often than it’s been rotten, but it’s not always been a clear call, especially in the past year or so, where the sheer volume of posts has tended to bring the average quality down. And there is the troubling tendency of the blog to give a prominent platform to science deniers and other posters whose prose is more pompous than wise, more raucous than reasoned. Will the new overlords encourage such stuff or give AH and her staff the backing to push quality forward?