Source: AOL to cut 700 jobs

Tuesday, November 2nd 2004, 6:08 pm

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ America Online, which has been trying to turn its fortunes around as users leave the service for broadband connections, plans to cut about 700 jobs next month, or 5 percent of its U.S. work force, in a bid to meet financial targets, a person familiar with the matter said Tuesday.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the job cuts would occur mainly in northern Virginia, where the online service is based. News of the cuts was reported earlier in The Washington Post.

Jim Whitney, an AOL spokesman, declined to comment.

Word of the job cuts came one day before AOL's parent company, the giant media conglomerate Time Warner Inc., reports earnings for its third quarter. AOL is expected to be a key topic for investors, including its efforts to seek new kinds of revenues as its dial-up users migrate to high-speed Internet connections.

AOL employs about 13,000 people in the United States and 20,000 worldwide. It had 23.4 million subscribers as of the end of June.

Last year the company cut 450 jobs in California as it consolidated its software development operations there.

AOL was once a leading star of the Internet business, and used its soaring stock to buy Time Warner at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000. Since then AOL's fortunes have waned, top AOL executives left or were reassigned, and the parent company removed the letters ``AOL'' from its name. Securities regulators are still investigating accounting practices at AOL.