AOL, the online media company that has recently snatched several smaller content firms, has agreed to purchase news blog service The Huffington Post for $315 million, the two companies announced Monday.

The companies said Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content.

Huffington Post is known for its political coverage, with a left-of-center bent, as well as blogging about sports, entertainment and local news in selective markets.

An executive on an AOL-Huffington Post call with reporters said that Huffington sales are expected to reach $50 million in 2011. Huffington says her company is profitable.

When the Huffington Post announced a “collaboration” with donors to launch the “Huffington Post Investigative Fund” with an initial budget of $1.75 million back in March of last year, we were giddy with excitement at the thought of people still CARING about quality news. Today, John Cook of Gawker (who we think is usually right-on-the-money with his posts 85% of the time), wrote a piece slamming the fund as being nothing more then a tax write-off and a way for the Huffington Post to have “exclusivity on stories”. Our take on this? Way too early to say in our opinion, and we whole-heartedly admit we love the Huff Post.

The main issue to date, is that very few websites have benefited from the fund except for the HuffingtonPost, and here we are 10+ months after the announcement of the fund. With that being said, let’s give it some more time. It takes TIME to investigate stories….we’ll keep tabs on ‘em and post news as it develops(!)