Arianna Huffington and NYT’s Bill Keller Vie for Top Editor Spot

For as long as the Power Grid has been around, The New York Times’ Bill Keller has owned the Newspaper/Online Editors category. It’s no surprise why — despite the Times’ financial and existential troubles, it remains the most influential newspaper in print, regularly breaking big stories and shaping the debate. It follows that the Times’ top editor should be the top editor in the business.

Much more surprising is Arianna Huffington coming in at #2, ahead of establishment heavyweights like The Washington Post’s Marcus Brauchli, The New York Post’s Col Allen, and USA Today’s Brian Gallagher. What gives?

Arianna’s placement is particularly impressive given that the ranking system weights editors’ print circulations fairly heavily. She gets hit with a pretty significant penalty since HuffPo is online-only, but she’s currently overcoming it by dominating the webbier stats. Her site has weathered the post-election cooldown well; according to Compete.com, it still gets more than 6 million uniques a month, and some traffic sites, such as Quantcast, put the figure above 10 million. She’s big on The Twitter. And it helps to write as much as she does; whereas many editors do all of their work behind the scenes, her column, love it or hate it, has become a pivot point for the blogosphere.

Also, we’ve been getting a lot of PR emails lately about how Arianna will voice a talking bear in Fox’s Family Guy spinoff The Cleveland Show; maybe that has something to do with it?

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