Lol. I work at aol. This has been 'the day' for months and months. You don't schedule multi-billion dollar mergers around the news cycle. Tomorrow is supposedly when everyone is supposed to start finding out if they have a job in the new company and for how long.
Lol. I was part of the core deal team. We did NOT know this would be the day for months and months.
But of course, that does not detract from your sentiment being 100% accurate. No one planned the timing of the consummation of the deal around random contemporaneous news events.
This was certainly not news on the aol side internally at least... Yahoo publicly disclosed in their SEC filings, so it wasn't even a leak or the rumour mill
It's a way of hiding/burying information. The info is legally required to be disclosed, but with so much else going on the news is unlikely to be widely covered.