AOL is finding success with a strategy that employs 300 content producers who maintain over 80 web sites, many of which don’t prominently display the AOL brand, according to David Carr. The recession and news industry troubles have helped by making available a large pool of talent, which the company has quickly snapped up in an effort to gain credibility:

At Politics Daily, there are many recognizable names, including Melinda Henneberger, formerly of The New York Times; Carl Cannon, who worked for years at major daily newspapers and National Journal; and Walter Shapiro, who worked at The Washington Post, USA Today, Time and Newsweek.

Todd Pruzan and Jeff Bercovici, both of the shuttered Portfolio, work for DailyFinance, while AOL’s FanHouse sports site is deep in newspaper veterans, including Kevin B. Blackistone, a former columnist for The Dallas Morning News, and Greg Couch, formerly of The Chicago Sun-Times. According to some I spoke to, their salaries approach the ones they left behind.

This content-focused staffing is combined with a de-emphasis on the AOL brand and portal approach that was a cornerstone of the 2000 AOL-Time Warner merger:

Visitors to sites like Engadget and FanHouse may not know that those sites emanate from a company that used to confine most of its communication to telling them they’ve got mail. Which is sort of the idea.

Tim Armstrong, who joined AOL as CEO in April, describes it this way:

“I am not sure that is important to the audience that Disney owns ABC or ESPN, so in the same way, FanHouse, our sports site, will live or die on its connection to the audience,” he said. “We can light a fuse, but whether or not it comes to fruition is reliant on the content.”

Time Warner plans to spin AOL off on its own by the end of this year, and this is the first in a long string of strategies that appears to be showing signs of success. The company’s sites have an aggregate of 76 million unique visitors, and individual sites are showing healthy audience figures, such as 3.6 million monthly visitors to Politics Daily (which launched in April) vs. 1.1 million monthly visitors to Politico, according to comScore. (Note: According to Quantcast, Politico.com has 5.4 million monthly visitors, so there’s clearly some variation in the data, but Politics Daily still shows significant growth in the five months since it launched.)

Photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters