AOL (NYSE: TWX) found a way to get a burst of attention that isn’t about Wednesday’s spinoff from Time Warner: announce a high-profile hire. New York Times vet Saul Hansell, the founding editor of the Bits blog, has left to join AOL as programming director of new content management platform Seed.com. The former tech reporter will be responsible for “leveraging Seed across all of AOL’s platforms” and will report to Mike Rich, SVP-AOL Entertainment. Having a journalist in that position may help AOL fend off some of the concerns that Seed.com is more about automating editorial content than managing it. Hansell, who posted the announcement on his personal blog with a note that he’d have more later, covered AOL until recently.