January 23 is also the birthday of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who, it should be noted, only won that one morning, and perhaps most fittingly, late Battleship Potemkin director Sergei Eisenstein. Most DC media types will tell you that they’ve never met a Politico reporter who wouldn’t push a baby down the stairs to get a story.

The nearly six minute video includes roastimonials from the likes of David Gregory, Bob Schieffer, Donald Trump,  Katie Couric, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Candy Crowley, Luke Russert, Greta Van Susteren, Chris Matthews, Jonathan Karl, Andrea Mitchell, Steve Scully, Jamal Simmons, Norah O’Donnell, Erin Burnett, Alex Wagner, Dan Rather, Al Sharpton, Mark Halperin, Dylan Ratigan and Arianna Huffington. FishbowlDC‘s Betsy Rothstein collects some of the funnier quotes:

Politico is “truly a news organization that acts its age: a petulant five-year-old concerned with only trivial matters,” host of “MTP” David Gregory says with a smile.

With a few repeats and some intensive listening, Arianna Huffington can be understood as saying, “Just as I was sitting down to write this, I saw that Mike Allen had already broken what I was going to say.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Willie Geist remarks, “I’ve gotta recuse myself because I don’t care for Politico, inside the Beltway gossipy garbage. And CBS “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer cracks, “The next thing you know, you’ll be getting your driver’s license.”

I don’t know that I can top any of them, but I will add this: Why did the Politico reporter cross the road? I don’t know, but give it 5 minutes, and FishbowlDC will have a plog post about it. Probably without a photo.

Even though we don’t go for this kind of self-promotion, the video is fun, and Politico has earned every second of it. Happy Birthday, Politico.

One of the things that makes Ed Schultz somewhat unique in the world of political commentary is his status as a former conservative turned liberal convert (Cenk Uygur, Arianna Huffington, and Media Matters founder David Brock are other notable examples; people like Dennis Miller and Dana Loesch went the other way). Some have questioned Ed’s conversion, casting it as a matter of commercial opportunism, but anyone who has watched or listened to Ed (the guy puts out 20 hours of programming per week) would be hard-pressed to come away believing that he’s living a lie. That would be a Meryl Streep-worthy performance.

Part of the problem is that some people have a very narrow definition of liberalism; that your personal beliefs must check all of the right boxes in order for you to qualify. In my view, liberalism isn’t about changing your personal beliefs, it’s about not imposing them on others, and about being willing to take in new information.

“I don’t think you wake up one day and roll out of the side of the bed and say ‘hey this is how i feel about issues.’” Ed told me. “I think for me, back in the mid-90s, I was going through a series of grassroots events that took a hold of me in my career that had me view things differently.”

Schultz cites things like the farm crisis, health care, education, and veterans issues as contributors to his gradual conversion. “One of the things that got me,” Ed said, “in 1998 when we went and did some radio work in SW North Dakota we had a town hall because the price crisis was going on, and the suicide rate was really high in that portion of NW South Dakota/SW North Dakota. It was really sad, ranchers and farmers that were 4th generation were losing everything they had because they couldn’t keep up. It made me rethink a value system — this is wrong, America was better than this.”

“Then I was connected to Senator Wellstone’s Rally for rural America in March of 2000, there was a 2 or 3 year period there that I had actually gone from somewhat of a conservative, to almost an independent, to one day when I came back and realized I’m a Democrat. The Democrats are more correct on the issues at this point in time than what I had known in the past. It’s not something you say all of a sudden — you don’t flip a light switch on — gosh I’m thinking differently on things now.”

As someone who once held some relatively conservative views (compared to those I hold now), the one problem I always had with Republican politics, the one bridge too far, was the party’s long history of divisive racial politics. I’ve often wondered how former conservatives like Schultz reconciled that.

“With my background,” Ed told me, “I’ve never had a problem with race, I went to a black high school, I’ve been intertwined with black culture since junior high school, going through forced busing for racial equality back in the late ’60s. Race really didn’t have any impact on me on how I felt with the ideological shift.”

He added that “The South has come a long way, even in the last 20 years, who would have ever thought a black man would win Virginia, would win North Carolina…That really didn’t have any impact on how I felt being conservative at the time, to where I am politically right now.”

While we were discussing the range of political attitudes that Ed has experienced, and where his needle falls on the ideological gauge these days, he articulated a wise approach to political commentary. “I don’t sit around thinking about what I’m liberal on or what I’m conservative on,” he said. “I think I take a pretty common sense approach on what is fair. What is fair to people.”

In this next portion of our exclusive interview, I asked Ed for his current views on the topics of marriage equality, abortion rights, and gun control, and even found out how many firearms the host owns. Coming soon: Ed talks about his place in the cable news landscape.

In the midst of a discussion on the media and contemporary society, Moyers cited Soros as an example of someone whom people should be listening more to.

I’ll tell you somebody you could, you should go for, because he has given more thought to this than almost anyone I know: George Soros, believe it or not. George Soros, whatever you think about his wealth or his politics, George Soros was next to Vaclav Havel I think the most catalytic agent for helping to bring down the Communist government behind the Iron Curtain because he, he gave everybody who wanted one an equivalent of a Xerox machine, and so they could get the message out.

And he is deeply troubled by the Orwellian power of the right-wing in this country today. He talks about it. I was on his board for a several years, and I’m off now that I’m back on the air, but I was on his board, and he is deeply troubled. He is a great devotee of the open society, the society that does change because it listens to itself, and learns from its experience.

He’s been the victim, of course, of Glenn Beck and the right-wing, the Fox News assassins. So he’s thought a great deal about the Orwellian idea, and he said it has arrived in this country. It is here, part of the permanent, a permanent characteristic of American democracy which is therefore self-suicidally bent because of the power and force of propaganda. He’d be somebody I know would write you a really good piece for that.

NewsBusters’ Noel Sheppard reacted to the video by asking readers “Need to know anything else about the politics of Bill Moyers?”

Watch video of the discussion below

h/t The Blaze

Christiane Amanpour asked the panel if Rick Santorum had the best chance of getting more support in Iowa, particularly from Cain supporters. Will argued there was indeed room in the GOP race for a “dark horse” like Santorum who’s been heavily involved in policy over the past few years to rise in the polls, but he was more concerned with the American political primary system and how it’s been hijacked by “charlatans, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurial charlatans.” Amanpour asked if Will was specifically referring to Cain. Will stated he was.

“Mr. Cain, who used this as a book tour, in a fundamentally disrespectful approach to the selection of presidents.”

RELATED: Herman Cain Exits Race With Admission That He Did Quote Pokémon That One Time

Will brought up another high-profile conservative celebrity, Donald Trump, and he clearly did not think highly of the Donald hosting a debate, saying it’s time for the candidates to “do something presidential, stand up and say, ‘we’re not going to be hijacked and participate in this.’” Arianna Huffington agreed, joking that Herman Cain might as well get his own reality show, given how much the rest of the presidential campaign has felt like one already.

Watch the video below, courtesy of ABC:

In addition to big media influencers, the list also includes women from various other competitive fields, including tech (Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg comes in at #5), entertainment (Lady Gaga finds herself in the #11 spot), business (Walmart heiress Alice Walton comes in at #85) and politics (Michele Bachmann gets the #22 spot, while Sarah Palin comes in at #34.) Topping the list this year is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

For a look at the full list — including bios of those who made the cut — visit Forbes‘ website.

In the meantime, take a look at the gallery below and tell us — Do you agree with Forbes‘ media picks? Who would you have added or left off?

Jill Abramson, #8 (1 of 10)

Next ►

Executive Editor, The New York Times

Huffington has faced fierce criticism for her conversion to left-wing politics that Rep. Bachmann, while certainly fending off a barrage of criticism of her own, never had to deal with. Much of this, of course, has to do with the fact that Rep. Bachmann switched teams very early on in life, and aside from some work for the Carter campaign in college, while Huffington experienced this conversion very late in life, and at a very convenient time– during the darkest of the Bush years, when a market had opened for liberal dissent and vocal calls for big government. But it also have to do with the nature of the change in ideology and the climate in which it happened.

That Huffington was once a conservative before metamorphosing into the liberal web proprietor we know today is no secret; she had lent prior support for Newt Gingrich and professed belief in small government. Here’s how a Salon column from 2003 described her evolution:

Of course, Huffington’s current political incarnation — anti-SUV polemicist, diarist of corporate greed — is an unlikely development for a woman who came to American political prominence as the wife of oil magnate Michael Huffington… She was widely viewed as the brains behind [his] campaign, and when it failed, she went on to work with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Then she began a slow, surprising evolution leftward — talking up the rumors of Warren Beatty’s presidential run, championing the candidacy of Republican insurgent John McCain, hosting the distinctly activist Shadow Conventions during the boring Democratic and Republican presidential-nominating gatherings in 2000, and finally, organizing the Detroit Project, which raised money and produced the controversial anti-SUV ads.

As the proprietor of the Huffington Post and author of several political tomes, it is difficult to recall her as anything but what she is today, but for those who saw her rise as a right-wing talking head, her current reinvention is difficult to reconcile. Take, for instance, an interview she did with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Freedom Watch, where the libertarian host asked point blank of her new position, “How can anyone take you seriously?”

Rep. Bachmann, in contrast, seems to take her days as a college liberal are mostly taken in jest, as she told a Michigan Republican gathering this year. “I’m a Minnesotan who had ‘DFL’ – that’s what we call Democrats in our state — stamped on my birth certificate,” she noted. This only changed when she read Gore Vidal‘s Burr, when “as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, ‘You know what? What he’s writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love?’” Unlike Huffington, one can see vestiges of the present Rep. Bachmann in her description of what she was like as a “liberal.”

What’s more, those on the right that condemn Huffington don’t do so simply because she abandoned their cause, but because she did so after having established herself with it. Experiencing a political conversion later in life and doing so in the political spotlight is nearly unforgivable in this highly polarized, futuristic world of 24/7 cable news and internet politistalking– a world, ironically, that Huffington had a great hand in constructing. It is not too different a phenomenon from what cost former Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter his seat in Congress. There is a point of no return in a public career from which one simply cannot survive as a respected political figure.

In Bachmann’s case, the switch was neither public nor as ideological as a change of label. She notes above that she was a Democrat by default. It is telling that she was a Democrat under Ford– given the insidious nature of the Watergate scandal, it would be wiser to distrust of the few remaining Republicans in the Ford era than of those looking for an alternative to seemingly endless corruption. And then there’s the eureka moment she thanks Gore Vidal for providing her. Nothing we know about Rep. Bachmann today would be incongruous with the idea that a book mocking the Founding Fathers would be offensive enough to her to prompt a political conversion.

For Huffington, it was the inconsistency of her beliefs that drove her to switch. She has admitted in interviews that her conversion was prompted by an increased trust in government. “I actually believed that the private sector would be able to address a lot of the issues that I believed were very important,” she told John Stossel in a 2008 interview. As much as Rep. Bachmann rails against the far-left extremism she sees in the Obama administration, there is no evidence she would not support a conservative Democrat who shared her beliefs on the size of government, because those haven’t changed.

The templates to follow for such conversions vary greatly, depending on the time and place in which each were enlightened, but to take the two at face value and claim that Huffington gets much more flak for having come from the right is to ignore a large set of factors that contributed to the lighthearted nature of young liberal Michele Bachmann turning into one of the more beloved and feared conservatives figures of our time and made the reverse phenomenon in Huffington far more controversial.

Update: A Huffington Post spokesman sent us the following statement:

I’m emailing you to correct inaccuracies in your story. Arianna Huffington did not for Governor of California as a conservative. She ran as an Independent. Furthermore, you claim that is was the “inconsistency of her beliefs” that caused her to change her politics. The truth is less dramatic: she has always been progressive on social issues — pro-choice, pro-gun control and, pro gay rights — even when she was a Republican. However, whereas she once believed the private sector would address America’s social problems, she realized first-hand that that wasn’t going to happen without government action.

Brokaw assessed the current debt deal:

“No one is happy with this. And by the way, this is not the end of the process, it’s the beginning of the process. This is going to play out for the next year. . . . It’s very likely that when the Republicans want to extend the Bush tax cuts, the President is going to say ‘I’m going to veto that.’ And we’re going to have another showdown come the fall.”

Brokaw noted that the Tea Party stayed disciplined as they got angry and got organized, and as a result, they got a favorable deal. Yet Joe Scarborough wasn’t sure why Nancy Pelosi should convince Democrats in the House to support such a bill when many Tea Party members still plan on voting against it? David Gregory suggested she has no real choice since President Obama has stressed how vital it is now that this deal gets passed, not just for Democrats but for the country.

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:

George Will didn’t think her migraines were a big deal either, suggesting “there is no reason to believe that this is incapacitating.” According to Will, many politicians in the past have had health problems, including some secret condition suffered by former president John Kennedy (so secret in fact that Will didn’t mention what exactly, but here’s a clue). Huffington agreed, insisting:

“The problem with Michele Bachmann is not her migraines, the problem is what she believes. And the idea that somehow she cannot deal with the big boy, man world of stress is so sexist.”

Although it still was humorous to hear Huffington describe, in her unique accent, the details of the allegations that whenever Bachmann misses a flight or someone quits “she’s taken to her bed, to her fainting couch – it’s very Victorian.” And hearing Amanpour’s unique pronunciation for the word “migraine” is likely to induce an awkward chuckle as well.

Watch the clip from ABC below:

While celebrating their 1,000th issue (or so they claim– the New York Times reports they don’t actually keep track) in more traditional ways with a look back at their greatest moments via one massive article on every news story ever, most of their self-lauding comes in the form of acrid insults towards the Pulitzer committee and anyone who has ever won one. The insults begin with an opinion piece by publisher emeritus T. Herman Zweibel, who notes that he once had faith in “former Onion copyboy” Joseph Pulitzer, but now sees him merely as a “horsehide-bound, brass-plated son-of-a-bitch… who could not even start a simple war with Spain without help from that other fulminating ass-hole, William Randolph Hearst.” The paper has also published a political cartoon wherein Osama Bin Laden attempts to thwart the Pulitzer Committee’s plans to award The Onion.

If that isn’t enough to endear The Onion to the powers-that-be at the Pulitzer Committee, there’s the work of Americans for Fairness in Awarding Journalism Prizes, a “non-profit” that has recruited a list of celebrity endorsers like Arianna Huffington, Tom Hanks, and celebrity chef Mario Batali to call for The Onion to earn it’s fair Pulitzer. AFAJP is also recruiting citizens to send in a form letter to the committee demanding The Onion receive an award this year, which is about as level-headed and polite as the rest of this entire campaign seems to be. The full text of that below:

You Ignorant, Negligent Swine:
Since 1917, your increasingly out-of-touch organization of so-called cultural arbiters has been awarding the most distinguished prize in American journalism, and at no point in that nearly century-long span have your thick, prestige-addled skulls been penetrated by the notion that perhaps it might finally be time to recognize the publication universally acknowledged as America’s Finest News Source.
From this, one can only assume that the members of the Pulitzer Board are either flagrantly in bed with the fat cats of Big Journalism [the mainstream media, not the Andrew Breitbart blog], legally blind, hopelessly stupid, or some astoundingly irresponsible combination of all three.

That is why I, a concerned citizen, am joining fellow justice-seekers at the media watchdog group Americans for Fairness in Awarding Journalism Prizes (AFAJP) to demand that you and your ambitiously moronic cohorts finally award The Onion the Pulitzer Prize it so richly deserves. To be perfectly frank, the fact that this has not yet happened, and that a form letter such as this requires sending in the first place, is an embarrassment not only to you and your families, but to our entire American way of life, which to the best of my knowledge is supposed to stand for values such as honesty, truth, and the commendation of the most deserving.

Perhaps if you were somehow able to disengage your sniveling faces from the tight confines of The New York Times’s ass long enough to wipe Thomas Friedman’s overrated shit from your eyes and take a look around you, you’d see that The Onion is universally esteemed—by everyone from the U.S. Senate to the common street vagabond—as the single most reliable, trustworthy, and relevant newspaper in the United States today.

Regardless, this summer marks the publication of The Onion’s 1,000th issue, and I believe it is high time you and your sick, allegedly on-the-take little cabal of excellence-rapers woke the hell up and faced reality—The Onion deserves one of your damned prizes way more than the simps you’ve been giving them to ever did, or ever will. How do I know this? Because I am astoundingly perceptive, moral, and intelligent. Why? Because I read The Onion.

Sincerely,
Concerned Citizen

Carr is the nucleus around which the film gathers, and his musings form much of the narration. While a 25-year veteran, much of Carr’s career has been with alternative publications, and his backstory reads more like a pulp novel than the resume of a media reporter for the world’s most prestigious newspaper. His emergence from drug addiction and crime give him a hard, weathered edge.

I asked Rossi how hard it was to resist making world-weary Carr the star of the film. “Initially that was my intention, it was to focus on David,” Rossi says. Carr resisted that idea, he says,  ”but ultimately, you know, I think he rises to the level of sort of being the star of the film. He is the Virgil, sort of guiding us through all of these stories in a broader sense like, you know, the audience’s potential feeling of alienation or dislocation in a digitizing world.”

Carr is such a colorful character, and his manner so abrasive at times, that it’s tough to imagine him succeeding for a less-prestigious paper. That’s probably why outsiders like Carr don’t often work their way up the line, from the mailroom to the newsroom, and why Carr is such a one-of-a-kind. He braces sources in a way that lets them know they need him more than he needs them.

Stelter, on the other hand, came to The Times fresh from college, after founding TV Newser . Such a rapid rise lends Stelter an outsider’s perspective of a different sort, the young, new media Turk to Carr’s deeply-etched cynic.

One of the film’s great pleasures is watching Carr’s complete ownership of new media types. He smacks down a conference room full of online entrepreneurs who try to feed him some PR pap, and deals Newser’s Michael Wolff a coup de grace during a debate on the merits of mainstream journalism with nothing more than a printout of Newser’s front page, and a pair of scissors.

In between Carr and Stelter, though, are scores of lifelong Times employees who are being laid off, evidence that they’re waging a losing battle against a media culture increasingly obsessed with profitable, popular fluff, and barely concerned with the future of journalism, the villains of the film. In one particularly evocative clip, Arianna Huffington compares those concerned with the cost-cutting and de-professionalization of journalism to prehistoric stone-tablet etchers, declaring that journalism “has always been a technology business.”

Rossi takes exception with that attitude. “I think it’s utterly insulting,” he says. “She almost says that people who are bemoaning the erosion of financial stability of newspapers, it’s like, who cares. There’s a lot of smart people saying that this is a digital evolution, the road to some utopian future are going to have a lot of dead bodies on the side of the road.”

“That sounds very hardcore and forward reaching,” he continues, “but that doesn’t take into account a lot of original data and information that those ostensible, potential dead bodies are producing. So, what are all these aggregators going to do in the future when there’s nothing to aggregate?”

Commerce above journalism is a running theme in Page One, such as when they show the Gawker “Big Board,” the new media equivalent of The Times’ front page, which runs on giving the people what they want, or Tribune Company CEO Sam Zell‘s contemptuous attitude toward traditional journalism.

“Anybody who can say, you know, that people who are talking about impacts of newspapers going out of business are a bunch of pussies, to me, sounds like a freak.” Rossi says.

The future is uncertain, but Rossi sees some hope in the results, so far, from the paper’s implementation of a paywall. “I know that about 150,000 people thus far have opted in,” Rossi says, “but I also know that the users for the website is typically about 40 million a month, and I think that that has gone down to about 36 million. And that statistic is pretty heartening, an attrition rate of just 10% for the paywall, when there were predictions that traffic would be cut in half or more.”

Rossi’s filmmaking style is intimate, yet cool, allowing the settings and characters to speak for themselves, and eschewing some of the more manipulative techniques of documentarians like Michael Moore.

“I love his films,” Rossi says of Moore. “Fahrenheit 911 was amazing and incredibly entertaining and really important. I agree, it’s really different from the way that I try to make films that are more observational and less with an agenda. It seems like when Michael Moore sets out to make a film, we almost have a problem set that he wants to find the proofs for. The whole movie is on a trajectory towards proving a point. I think that this film, I think there are a lot of imperatives or messages, but I don’t think that it’s out to prove a point. I think it does prove certain things, but it’s not crafted to do so.”

Perhaps indicative of the future that his film tries to lay out, Rossi gets his news from a hybrid of the old and the new. “I subscribe to the daily, print newspaper versions of the NY Times and the NY Post, I get them delivered to my door. And I check twitter multiple times a day. Twitter has become, I think, the real fountain of news stories. More often that not I’m finding stories you know, at the Times, The Journal, the Washington Post, all kinds of blogs, all over the place.”

The New York Times is far from perfect (as the film illustrates by detailing some of its darker hours like the Jayson Blair scandal and Judith Miller‘s pre-Iraq War reporting), but it’s a bellwether for the health of newspaper journalism, and journalism as a whole. Page One offers some hope for its survival, but not much for a suitable replacement if it doesn’t.

Wrote Robinson:

Here is the comScore page view trend for Yahoo! blogs in 2011:

Jan = 353 MM PV

Feb = 369 MM PV

Mar = 472 MM PV

Apr = 506 MM PV

Here, I think, is the cool story for our blogs:

— 57 million people in the US read a Yahoo! blog in April 2011, more than visited any blogging network, including Blogger, WordPress, Gawker, and Huffington Post.

— Yahoo! Blogs delivered 506 million PV in April, more than Huffington Post and twice as many as Gawker Media.

(Source: comScore Media Metrix, April 2011, US)

The news comes at the heels of many, and, in some cases, conflicting, reports on Gawker’s numbers following the blog network’s redesign, although The Mottram Program Tumblr blog describes Yahoo’s numbers as double that of Gawker’s. Back in January, Gawker founder Nick Denton told paidContent that, for him, unique visitors hold more water than pageviews.

And the Huffington Post, of course, has folded in and taken control of Aol’s blog content following Aol’s multi-million dollar purchase of Arianna Huffington‘s blog empire.

h/t The Mottram Program via Anthony De Rosa

The announcement came in the wee hours of the morning via Aol’s own TechCrunch, which also shared that Yahoo will be hiring Singh as the new editor in chief of the Yahoo Media Network.

Pitney was previously HuffPost’s executive editor, having initially served as the site’s politics editor throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, before becoming the site’s national editor and Washington bureau chief.

HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington sent an internal memo about Pitney’s promotion:

I’m delighted to announce that Nico will become the Managing Editor of The Huffington Post Media Group. Jai and I have been talking for some time about his desire to return home to California and his family. I’m delighted to announce that Nico will become the Managing Editor of The Huffington Post Media Group. Jai and I have been talking for some time about his desire to return home to California and his family.

via TechCrunch

Since Aol CEO Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington jointly announced plans to merge their companies on Super Bowl Sunday, many media critics have guessed how these household brand-name media companies would specifically co-mingle. And while its been widely reported that, post-acquisition, Aol has bee shedding numerous writer, reporters and content producers, Mediaite hears from a credible source that in the coming days, Aol News will officially fold its operations entirely.

In early March, reports surfaced of upwards to 750 individuals being laid off as a result of the merger, the majority of which they claimed were technical staffers overseas. However, nearly 120 of these staffers were in editorial roles, immediately raising questions about Aol’s integration strategy with Huffington Post content. In fact, one could reasonably wonder what exactly comprises the Aol News department right now, apart from some blue ribbon reporters still on staff and an AP newsfeed.

Aol CEO Tim Armstrong clearly saw HuffPost as a turnkey content solution for his burgeoning strategy to grow his media assets and distance himself from the subscription/ISP revenue model, which clearly makes Aol News redundant.

Since launching just over five years ago, Huffington Post has redefined what is currently considered successful Internet content strategy, with smart original reporting combined with fast third-party content curation ,and clever headlines. But the editorial tilt to Huffington Post is its unique point of view, or as some have noted, its “coastal tabloid sensibility.” Its worth nothing that Huffington Post launched as the liberal alternative to the Drudge Report.

While one can reasonably assume that the “Aol News” brand will still exist online, more to the point, all of the content will be produced and overseen by the Huffington Post team.

The folding of the Aol News department and replacement by HuffPost will create an interesting dynamic between the more predominantly “red state” Aol users who will now be directed to “blue state” oriented Huffington Post content. Regardless, this provides the most convincing argument to date that Huffington Post was only “acquired by Aol,” as far as the finance departments are concerned.

When reached, Aol did not immediately provide comment. We will update accordingly.

This makes Zeller the third big name that has left The New York Times for HuffPost after national editor Tim O’Brien and business editor Peter Goodman. And with good reason, apparently: according to a source at the paper, the move is “all about the money,” even if Zeller won’t exactly be making the $400,000 and $350,000 O’Brien and Goodman are raking in, respectively.

Said Zeller of the move:

It’s been a source of great pride for me to walk through the doors of The New York Times every day, and I’ve just been so immensely lucky to have had the opportunity to grow and learn the craft in that environment. I will truly miss the folks there. But I also think it’s critically important that we continue developing and nurturing a diverse new ecosystem of quality journalism across a variety of platforms and business models.

He also told Business Insider that he sees the move to HuffPost / Aol as a “new adventure” in newly-charted territory.

In addition to effectively poaching Zeller from the NYT, HuffPost has also brought aboard Paul Raushenbush, who is leaving his position as Princeton’s associate dean of religious life to become HuffPost Religion’s senior editor.

h/t Business Insider

Andrew Breitbart

We meet in Breitbart’s hotel lobby, then cast about for a Starbucks to settle into. Even as we search for a suitable location, the interview is already underway. Perhaps fittingly, Breitbart and I end up in the Starbucks across from Fox News’ midtown headquarters.

Breitbart can go for hours dismantling arguments from and about the American left– he despises their elitist system and has spent many years both working inside it, and studying it from afar. Much of Righteous Indignation chronicles his years as a “default liberal,” when, he tells me, all the books he read in college literature classes were “about rape,” and injected him with a pervasive self-loathing for being American.

Yes, academia is a major Breitbart target– in my estimation, his biggest and most complex. He calls the current higher education system a “factory” of liberal thought where, ultimately, “there’s no there there” intellectually. In his book, Breitbart corroborates his arguments, that the current academic system is dangerous, with copious references. However, he doesn’t rely simply on your standard Marx and Engels (and, of course, Saul Alinsky), but Jean-Jacques Rousseau, critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and a host of other citations straight out of your standard sociology core curriculum. The result, he explains, is that “if you go into an academic institution with a clean slate, you are very likely to come out a liberal. That is a huge problem.”

For conservative academics, he argues, the problem is not indoctrination, but exclusion for having the “wrong” ideology, citing Camile Paglia as an example.

NEXT PAGE: Andrew Breitbart defends the Sarah Palin as a “very intelligent, well-read lady.”

Gawker, noting that Working Life featured a means of contacting Tasini with advertising inquiries, asked him whether he ever successfully sold ad space on his blog and, if so, whether he used that profit to reimburse his contributors for their work:

There was never a thought that we would do that.

Oh, I see what you’re doing. Are you comparing my little blog to the Huffington Post? That’s absurd.

Gawker concedes this point while also noting that Tasini has something of a history of “getting paid without doing too much work himself,” pointing to his previous lawsuit against The New York Times Co. as well as his “Creators Federation” project – a now-defunct nonprofit from which Tasini managed to receive $46,700 in consulting fees between 2002 and 2003.

The nonprofit, Tasini explains, was created as a lobbying group for creative writer types, but he was forced to shut it down after two years when he didn’t receive the response he’d hoped.

The article manages to make Tasini seem opportunistic (a criticism Huffington also hinted at in her response to the lawsuit) but – playing Devil’s Advocate here – the man could also be seen as someone who is just plain creative when it comes to making money. If you can’t beat the system, join it to a degree. Then try to beat it again.

The same goes for fighting the blogging machine as with running for Congress, we suppose.

h/t Gawker

When paidContent brought up the valid point that Tasini not only agreed to blog for HuffPost for free, but did so over a period of five years, Tasini responded that “it’s almost irrelevant what agreement was done up front.”

Tasini says in the paidContent post:

On a moral basis, there’s no question there’s unjust enrichment. People were misled about the nature of The Huffington Post. A lot of people were shocked by the notion that once sold, everything we wrote was [owned by HuffPo]. Essentially what we’re doing is saying, look, you should share that wealth [that came from the sale].

Tasini also claims that those who agreed to contribute to the Huffington Post’s group blog were somehow under the impression that, eventually, one HuffPost’s model proved profitable, they would see payment:

People believed that at some point there would be money forthcoming. They believed that once this was a profit-making venture, people would get paid. More and more people are coming forward with examples—they believe promises were made to them.

From a legal point of view, it’s not important—for what we’re arguing—whether people agreed to write for free or not. I will say this—we do want to set up a system going forward that does set a standard [for when writers should get paid].

And then things get interesting. Tasini shared that he was asked to blog because he was running against Hillary Clinton who, apparently, Huffington dislikes. O rly?

He also says the he keeps “getting emails from a whole variety of writers who want to join on as plaintiffs, who are giving us all sorts of inside information.” Plus, while he’s not sure whether his suit will prove successful, he does believe that Huffington has made a “blunder:”

Her arrogance and her clear bile, partly towards me but towards all the people who created the content—that’s working against her. People would have been very reasonable and it would have bought her a lot of good will if she had said, I just got fabulously rich—again—let’s sit down and figure out how I help the people who made this a valuable company. Instead she said, screw you. It’s a totally Marie Antoinette approach.

We’re not sure whether Huffington’s response to the lawsuit – you might recall that she seemed mostly unconcerned by it, even opining that it was, legally, “without merit” – showed bile towards those who contribute to the HuffPost for free, but, rather, annoyance that Tasini was, as the insinuated in her blog post, opportunistically trying to garner money and attention for himself.

It’s a charge seemingly echoed by a recent Gawker post noting that, while Tasini strove to make money through his own blog, he never reimbursed his contributors, either. In fact, it would appear that much of digital ink spilt over this lawsuit has been devoted to describing the personalities at play here rather than whether the suit does indeed have merit. (Because it seems that, form what we’ve read around the web so far, the general consensus is that, no, it does not.)

h/t paidContent

And, if her kitten jokes are anything to go by, Huffington isn’t terribly worried about the lawsuit:

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by Jonathan Tasini is so utterly without merit, and has been so thoroughly eviscerated in the media — including being ridiculed as the “dumbest lawsuit ever” — I am hesitant to take any time away from aggregating adorable kitten videos to respond.

But the suit touches on so many important issues about the current state of the media, the kittens will have to wait.

First, let’s look at the merits of the case:

There are none.

Then, beyond insinuating that Tasini’s motives may be more opportunistic than noble, Huffington maintains that the main issue at hand here is that absolutely no contract was broken between the Huffington Post and its contributors.

Furthermore, she adds, HuffPost’s “group blog” – to which unpaid, non-staff bloggers contribute – provides a flexible and highly visible platform for exposure. And, besides – the silent majority of Huffington Post bloggers are fine with the way the group blog is set up.

While that all makes a heaping amount of sense, we’re not too sure Huffington’s continued comparison to the free content provided on her site and the free content available on, say, Facebook bolsters her argument:

Free content — shared by people who want to connect, share their passions, and have their opinions heard — fuels much of what appears on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Flickr, and YouTube. As John Hrvatska, a commenter on the New York Times, wrote of the Tasini suit, “So, does this mean when YouTube was sold to Google that all the people who posted videos on YouTube should have been compensated?” (And Mr. Hrvatska no doubt contributed that original and well-reasoned thought without any expectation he’d be paid for it. He just wanted to weigh in.)

The difference here is that YouTube, Twitter and the like don’t demand quality content, and a review on Yelp, for instance, doesn’t represent Yelp as a company or brand, whereas a Huffington Post blog post does. And privacy settings on sites like Facebook indicate that the purpose of the site isn’t necessarily to provide a wide-ranging platform for self-expression or discussion but, rather, a place to share photos and links with a set number of friends. Following this line of thinking, filing a very public lawsuit is just a way for Tasini to seek further exposure.

It’s a bit like comparing apples to adorable little kittens, really.

h/t Huffington Post

But why the public cry for a strike now? What happened last week? Did Huffington Post suddenly change its model as a result of its sale to Aol? Are they now refusing to pay bloggers and editors they had been paying for years? Has the merger led them to change the pay scale for their writers? Unless there was a major development I missed, isn’t this exactly what they have been doing since they launched in 2005? So why now?

Maybe, in the words of the Newspaper Guild, because the outcry comes “in the wake of its $315 million merger with AOL.” Ah. So it’s the fact that Huffington Post now has a distinct and clear numerical value? In the wake of an apocalypse for newspapers, some writers who blogged to have their voices heard (and often promoted by the Huffington Post P.R. team), with no suggestion that they would, or even might, get paid, appear to be suffering from a form of envious sticker shock.

The Guild press release quotes Cherie Turner, a former Huffington Post writer, saying, “Certainly, we all have written for free for the great exposure the Huffington Post can give us, but what’s the cost? Those of us on strike feel it undermines the value of our profession and is unethical, especially in light of great profits by those at the top. We are only asking for a fair share of what we are helping to create.”

Wait, it is suddenly unethical because the company succeeded? And what exactly might be a “fair share?” The primary source of Huffington Post’s success is not the bloggers who write for free and generate comparatively little traffic (and therefore revenue) for the site. Rather, it’s the fact that Huffington Post simply became the best aggregator in the business (they are now doing far more than that, but it’s clear that is where they truly outwitted the competition). Whatever one thinks of aggregation, it has little to do with whether they pay bloggers, who usually write in a separate section of the site. Their paid editors have become trusted sources for identifying and packaging the most interesting, compelling and important stories to their readers in a variety of areas.

Of course it’s also true that aggregation has had a disastrous effect on newspapers and I believe journalism as a whole. But is that what this call for a boycott is about? I thought this was about writing for free? The sad plight of newspapers (and journalism) is not to be minimized, but with or without Huffington Post, newspapers would be suffering the precise fate they are today.

More important, they are only demanding a “fair share” after the sale even though there was never an expectation of compensation? Using that logic, why shouldn’t every unpaid expert who appeared on NBC, CNBC or MSNBC to explain a complex issue that he or she has studied for years be entitled to a fair share of the GE sale of NBC to Comcast? What about other experts quoted in articles who have worked all their lives, often for very little pay, to reach this point in their careers? Are they entitled to a “fair share” of the value of the media entity in which they are quoted (sometimes quotes they took hours to craft)? What about the thoughtful, and often prolific, Huffington Post commenters?

Cherie Turner’s quote in the Guild release continues: “We are also speaking out against real journalism being run side-by-side with advertorial.“ Oh, so wait: now it’s not just that they/she want a payout for what was clearly understood as a promotional opportunity. No, now a new bogeyman emerges: the “advertorial.” So on the one hand they want a piece of the financial windfall, while on the other they want HuffPo to stop doing something that has helped lead to that payday? The debate over advertorials and how far they can/should go is an important one but the “picketers” have to pick and choose their battles. This begins to feel like a hodgepodge of complaints that have less to do with blogging for free and more to do with content businesses on the Internet.

With that said, even though I own a digital media company, I post a few of my own stories on Huffington Post after they appear on Mediaite, in the hope that they/we will be able to reach as broad an audience as possible. This, despite the fact that Huffington Post is in some ways a competitor (although our 10 million unique monthly visitors are dwarfed by their 45). There is a value, for a writer or a growing digital media business (which can be pricey), in having a story promoted and read on Huffington Post.

Look, the sale of Huffington to Aol is a perfect time to revitalize an all-important discussion/debate over the future of journalism. What can be done to ensure that quality investigative reporting continues? How do we keep foreign bureaus afloat? Who will fund it? But the solution is not to ask for tiny payouts for various bloggers who wrote for Huffington Post. Nor is it necessarily wise for individuals looking for work to stop publishing pieces that they cannot sell elsewhere. But that is their decision. They can determine whether publishing on Huffington Post, or anywhere else without payment, is worth it. In the meantime, don’t hate the player, hate the game—the Internet, it has changed the rules for everyone, Huffington Post just figured out how to play it before everyone else.

Journalist and union organizer Jonathan Tasini is leading the class-action lawsuit against not only the Huffington Post and Aol, but HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington as well.

Tasini had blogged for the Huffington Post – for free, of course – since its early days, but elected to stop contributing three days after the site announced its lucrative deal with Aol in February.

And this isn’t the first time Tasini has launched a suit against a veritable media empire. Reports Forbes:

Tasini was also the lead plaintiff in New York Times Co. vs. Tasini, a lawsuit over the rights of papers to license the work of freelancers for distribution via electronic databases.That case was decided in favor of the plaintiffs.

It’s also not the first time on this particular merry-go-round for Aol: The company was sued In 1999, after two volunteer chatroom moderators determined their working conditions were in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Their suit was eventually resolved with a $15 million settlement.

With Aol and Huffington Post cutting back on bloggers and freelancers and focusing instead on “journalists” providing original reporting, it could be that the companies were already set to rely less on the efforts of unpaid contributors. At any rate, this marks a pivotal turning point for Aol, HuffPost, and other big companies who stand to make a lot of money off of unpaid labor. Then again, the old argument still stands: No one forces writers to contribute to sites that don’t pay them rather than magazines and websites that will. And the exposure and expanded portfolio they receive from contributing their writing to these sites may prove well worth the effort for some.

Needless to say – we can’t wait to see how this turns out.

h/t Forbes‘ Mixed Media

The NY Post reports:

NBC’s “Today” co-host Matt Lauer has told the network that he will be leaving the show when his contract expires on Dec. 31, 2012, according to a new report.

The “Today” show released a statement Wednesday that neither confirmed nor denied the report.

“There seems to be an awful lot of speculation around news anchors these days, and it’s not our practice to comment on any of it,” it read. “Matt Lauer has a long term contract with NBC News and ‘Today.’”

Entertainment Tonight, citing a source, reported that Lauer was leaving.

Update: An inside source at MSNBC denies this report

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is also on this year’s list of nominees – not only for her continued demonstration of strength and resilience in the face of tragedy, but also, we’re sure, for the manner in which the hubbub surrounding the details of her attack have influenced the media’s very tone and rhetoric in reporting on such tragedies.

Readers can vote now through April 12th on whether each person on the list is truly influential, with the eventual winner set to appear in the magazine’s upcoming 2011 Time 100 issue.

As of this moment, the Fukushina 50 – the name given to the nearly 200 nuclear plant workers risking their lives to keep the plant’s reactors from overheating – are neck-and-neck with South Korean pop star / actor “Rain” – who manages to rake in a huge number of votes nearly every year, to the point that Stephen Colbert has interviewed him about the phenomenon. Hey, the people have spoken!

Check out the list and tell us: Who do you think should not be on it?

h/t Time.com

In addition to poking fun at the New York Times‘ paywall in general, Arianna Huffington‘s post about this new digital subscription plan includes a nice little dig at New York Times executive editor Bill Keller:

On HuffingtonPost.com you can view the first 6 letters of each word at no charge (including slideshows of adorable kittens). After 6 letters, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber. You may choose to subscribe to see the rest of each word individually, or choose a package to access all words of more than 6 letters.

You’ll remember that Keller referred to HuffPost’s special formula as being comprised of “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications,” all with a dash of liberal viewpoints and some eye of newt.

Aaaanyway. Here are some other perks NYT employees can enjoy:

If you come in through Facebook, you’ll be able to access for free all stories involving animals born with extra limbs.

If you come in through Twitter, you’ll be able to access for free words that contain more than six letters, but only those that refer to antiquated transportation machines (i.e. “funicular”).

If you come in through Google, you’ll be able to access stories of criminals who break into people’s houses and then do strange things, such as take a shower or eat a snack.

If you come in through Digg, you’ll be able to read for free all stories that refer to TV’s Erik Estrada.

So, you know. Kind of a fun way to keep a feud going – and make fun at oneself – especially in light of Huffington’s recent interview with the New York Times‘ magazine.

h/t HuffPost

The magazine broached another contentious and persistent criticism the Huffington Post has been contending with since it’s inception, and especially in the wake of its deal with Aol:

You’ve been saying recently that The Huffington Post is not a lefty publication?

Actually I’ve been saying that for three years. The tag line that we’ve used a lot is “Beyond left and right.”

Three years ago was 2008. I looked at The Huffington Post a great deal during the election. It felt like the Internet version of Keith Olbermann’s show, and if that’s not lefty. . . .

Why don’t you be more specific? What were the messages that you considered lefty?

While Huffington doesn’t deny that her site clearly has “progressive views,” she believes the term “lefty” misses, as she phrases it, “the whole point that American policy needs to be redefined beyond left and right” – an argument she’s repeated the many, many times she’s been asked this very question since news of the $315 million Aol deal first broke.

The interview, which seems designed around repeating the string of critiques and accusations Huffington and HuffPost have received over the years, also asked Huffington about a leaked Aol document emphasizing, basically, “pageview fodder.” Huffington, no stranger to going after headlines that are particularly sensational and search engine friendly, wisely noted that this document precedes her dealings with Aol.

And then there’s this…

I look at your writers much less than I find myself clicking on stuff that’s been aggregated or the more salacious, boob-related posts.

That’s really a shame. I think you’re missing out. Jason Linkins is doing some of the best media writing. Amanda Terkel’s coverage of Afghanistan has been ahead of the curve. Shahien Nasiripour has been breaking news constantly on Wall Street reform. Maybe you should be reading more of that and clicking less on the boobs.

While some of Huffington’s critics might be clapping in delight over the NYT‘s decidedly pointed questions, the fact remains that Huffington is no fool and, what’s more, these questions, while phrased in such a way that basically ensures the original story will be widely quoted, shared and, yes, aggregated, are nothing new.

The Huffington Post is often made to be whipping boy of sites that feature a mix of aggregated stories, op-ed articles and original reporting because it’s so damn successful – and because its founder, while controversial, is terribly charismatic. This isn’t to say that HuffPost is either an inherently benevolent or malignant force when it comes the changing nature of online news… but neither is the New York Times, especially where its treatment of Huffington and the Huffington Post are concerned.

h/t The New York Times

The Huffington Post has always defended its pay model by noting that its contributors are paid – in exposure and increased opportunities. But how do the bloggers themselves feel about their lack of monetary payment? One company providing content to the Huffington Post, Visual Arts Source, announced its plans to seek payment, and urged other unpaid contributors to strike in solidarity. Our own Dan Abrams even weighed in on the Newspaper Guild’s support of the strike.

Researchers from U.C. Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center developed a survey to find out just how individual bloggers feel about the site’s payment system. One of the researchers working on the survey explains why they decided to conduct it at this particular time:

We have been planning this survey from the time we heard about the merger.

The merger provides an opportunity to focus on the conditions of digital labor (e.g., bloggers), and who is responsible for value creation (contributors v. distributors) in the digital environment.

Researchers searched out the email addresses for various HuffPost contributors, and contacted them directly. Questions on the survey include the following:

- Do you feel you should receive part of the $315 million AOL used to purchase the Huffington Post?

- Do you feel that the Huffington Post’s brand has changed since the merger with AOL?

- How would you compare the conditions at the Huffington Post to other sites you have blogged for?

- Some have raised concerns about the labor arrangement bloggers have with The Huffington Post. In your opinion, what do you think is the best way for bloggers to address the issue of compensation for digital labor?

Survey results are due out next month.

h/t Forbes‘ Mixed Media

Snark is the medium of the day. I don’t have Google alert because it just distracts the brain. At the end of the day, we have bigger things to worry about than that, quite frankly. We have a magazine to remake.

(It is noted, in the interview, that Brown prefers her omelets with egg whites and her toast without butter – either because it shows her restraint and discipline, or because it is assumed that people are curious about what it is that famous women eat for breakfast. The answer is: The weak.)

Brown notes the challenges of working with a “legacy brand” like Newsweek (its latest issue, the first to feature its redesign, has Secretary of Sate Hillary Clinton on its cover): “Not that the Beast was easy but it was unencumbered. There’s a legacy at Newsweek but . . . I have an appetite for it. I really do love journalism.”

One thing that sets Brown apart from other publishers, online or otherwise, is that she’s willing to pay for good content – in the Daily Beast’s case, that means $350 per article:

As a writer myself, I cannot look other writers in the face and ask them to do things for nothing. In the same way, I wouldn’t ask my dentist to give me a free filling. Writing is a profession and you should have respect for that and should pay for it.

This predictably draws a comparison with the woman long painted as Brown’s “frenemy” – friend and rival Arianna Huffington, whose pay model differs quite a bit from Brown’s. Brown simply refers to her as a “very old girlfriend” of 30 years whose work and tenacity she admires.

When asked why, unlike her pal Huffington, she chose not to have her name on her website, Brown replied that such a thing would work to diminish the work put in by all the site’s contributors.

It’s a nice sentiment, surely, but one benefit of having one’s name on one’s website is that it capitalizes on a famous individual’s cult of personality. Brown, despite or because of the variety of reactions she inspires (see: “hagfish”), draws interest. She’s now, for better or worse, the face of both the Daily Beast and Newsweek, and perhaps both brands could benefit from serving as, basically, brand extensions for Tina Brown, Inc. She says what people want to hear – She pays her contributors! She respects the group effort responsible for her site’s content! – she’s contentious enough to draw comparisons to horrific forms of sea life (What woman could ask for more?), she has famous friends and she’s tough. Why not add more Tina, especially given most would rather read about the journalist / business woman than pick up Newsweek? Sure, an emphasis on quality content and accessible means of providing information and entertainment to readers will help, but where is Newsweek‘s competitive edge? Newsweek has been, as Hot Air aptly described it, “oatmeal in a silver bowl” for too long. It needs a little (lot) more personality – namely, Brown’s. Then maybe, someday, we can read articles about Brown that still make note of her breakfast preferences, but don’t paint her as “that woman whose job is kind of like Arianna Huffington’s.”

h/t The Guardian

The pressure began to mount on the Huffington Post nearly immediately after their decision, although, as Breitbart himself noted, the comments from viewers appeared to be as civil as they were outraged. The Van Jones-founded Color of Change organization rapidly responded with a petition to have Breitbart removed from the site, to which HuffPo‘s Ruiz responded with a statement noting that Breitbart was not the first conservative on the site and that they would continue to promote him:

From the beginning, The Huffington Post has welcomed voices from all sides of the political spectrum, including conservatives such as Newt Gingrich, Frank Luntz, Tom Coburn, Laura Ingraham, Bob Barr, George Pataki, David Frum, Byron York, Mary Matalin, and Ken Blackwell. The idea being that dialogue — from a wide range of perspectives — is preferable to silence. The fact that Andrew Breitbart’s first post on our site drew over 1,635 comments, conducted in a civil manner, seems to validate the premise and the decision to publish his blog post.

While the Huffington Post continued to defend their new contributor, Breitbart put on the war paint and went after Color of Change in an interview with the Daily Caller, calling the organization a bunch of “freaks” and Jones himself a “commie punk.” This, apparently, was a turning point for the publication, which released a second statement today, partially retracting the first:

Andrew Breitbart’s ad hominem attack on Van Jones in The Daily Caller — right down to calling him a “commie punk” and “a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak” — violates the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched. As a result, we will no longer feature his posts on the front page. He is welcome to continue publishing his work on HuffPost provided it adheres to our editorial guidelines, as the two posts he published on HuffPost did — guidelines that include a strict prohibition on ad hominem attacks.

In response, Color of Change has mostly ended its campaign, releasing this public statement:

ColorOfChange.org applauds The Huffington Post’s decision to no longer give Andrew Breitbart a prominent platform for his so-called ‘journalism’. Breitbart, whose entire career is built upon ‘reporting’ lies and falsehoods disguised as news, should have never been given the opportunity to present himself as a legitimate journalist or opinion-maker. Their decision is an important reversal. Over the course of one day, over 43,000 of our members called on The Huffington Post to end to their promotion of Breitbart. The Huffington Post has done the right thing by refusing to elevate someone who fear mongers, race-baits and lies – none of which have a place in America’s public discourse.

Naturally, Breitbart is not happy– his Twitter feed a minefield of retweets about the scandal, with his own short and sweet take on it: “Check my Twitter feed: Toldja the organized left are totalitarian anti-free speech freaks. Van*glorious & van*quished Jones leading charge!” Meanwhile, on Big Journalism, Dana Loesch wasted no time in decrying “Marxist bullying” on Jones’ part. But it’s not just the Breitbart empire and the conservatives who love it that find the entire affair leaving them with a bitter taste in their mouths: Salon’s Alex Pareene argues that cronyism– and not ethics– is behind the 180º turn, while still managing to call Breitbart “a crusading propagandist who publishes a wide variety of untruths and smears” and “a shameless, race-baiting bully”:

Breitbart then apparently went too far when he said a bunch of stupid and offensive things about Van Jones in an interview with the Daily Caller. And Arianna is actually quite close to the former White House “green jobs czar.” [...]

A strict prohibition on ad hominem attacks! (“Against Arianna’s friends,” is the big of that sentence that spokesman Marco Ruiz left out.) (Also there is apparently no prohibition on constant, practically obsessive race-baiting, but whatever.) (And obviously there is no prohibition whatsoever on spreading toxic bullshit about autism and other assorted crimes against science.)

Pareene ends his assessment of the entire “stupid” ordeal suggesting that this is only good news for Breitbart, as it promotes a narrative of censorship on the left he persistently promotes. It does both silence Breitbart to an audience he has little exposure to and promote his profile to the people who regularly read him, so the score is as yet unsettled, and we’ll have to wait for more than a tweet or two to hear what Breitbart intends to do about it.

At today’s MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit, Huffington announced plans to unveil a UK edition of HuffPost this summer. The new blog will echo the U.S. formula that has continuously brought the Huffington Post both pageviews and criticism: It’ll feature a core group of paid editors and invite unpaid writers to contribute to a group blog.

And the UK represents just the first step in the newly-formed Huffington Post Media Group’s plans for world domination. Tim Armstrong, Aol’s chief executive, told summit-goers that the U.S. represents a mere 4 percent of the world’s population.

HuffPost’s international editions would very likely steer clear of having the political tilt upon which the American version was originally founded. But make no mistake: Kitten videos are a global phenomenon. Seriously, though, TechCrunch’s revelation that the Huffington Post is beefing up its reporting team and seeking to build centralized newsrooms fits in neatly with the brand’s plans to expand internationally, offering not only aggregated stories but, original – and, thus, possibly hyperlocal – reporting as well.

h/t Guardian

We hear that Ephron, who is an editor-at-large at the Huffington Post in addition to the guiding force behind its “divorce” vertical, hosted a dinner party in celebration of HuffPost’s recent merger with Aol, which made Huffington president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group.

The Indian feast (prepared by Ephron herself) was enjoyed by several bold face names working in media: ABC anchor and correspondent Diane Sawyer (who had just returned from Japan); writer, director and producer Mike Nichols; ABC anchor Christiane Amanpour; journalist and professor Jamie Rubin; Frank Rich (who recently left The New York Times for New York Magazine); Rich’s wife, The New York Times‘ Alex Witchel; MSNBC host Joe Scarborough; Scarborough co-host, Mika Brzezinski, attorney and philanthropist David Boies and his wife, Mary Boies; magazine publisher Mort Zuckerman; Newsweek / Daily Beast editor in chief Tina Brown; and her husband, writer and former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans.

Not a bad crowd for a Wednesday night supper.

Well, Huffington decided to respond to Keller’s claims yesterday evening, calling his piece an “exceptionally misinformed attack.” Huffington echoed the snarky tone of Keller’s article in her response, and even managed to get in a dig at News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch in the process. Now that’s multi-tasking:

After opening his piece by patting himself on the back so hard I’d be surprised if he didn’t crack a rib (it seems everyone — even Woody Allen and those folks on Twitter — thinks he’s super “powerful” and “influential”!), Keller turned to the putative subject of his column: “the ‘American Idol’-ization of news” and the evils of “aggregation.” Hearkening back to the glory years when Rupert Murdoch and his minions labeled sites that aggregate the news “parasites,” “content kleptomaniacs,” “vampires,” and “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet” (the news industry equivalent of “your mama wears army boots!” although, not quite as persuasive), Keller says of aggregation: “In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.”

The response, as most responses to personal digs end up doing, sets the tone for a “he said, she said” squabble rather than an important discussion on the ethics of online reporting in a changing media climate, which both these pieces could have had the opportunity to be.

The trouble with this (or the benefit of this, depending on how you look at it) is, of course, the same we expressed in our look at Keller’s original article: Both entries’ “churlish” tone is part of what makes them so gosh darn sharable across the internet. Of course every media writer is going to sink his teeth into a feud between Keller and Huffington (Print vs. Web! Old vs. New! Lib vs… Lib!), but the personal digs and smattering of jokes make these of interest to those beyond the small media bubble wherein everyone is constantly writing about what his neighbor is writing about his neighbor.

In short, Keller’s decision to tout his inclusion on various “most influential” lists and to call Huffington and Aol’s new reporting staff something akin to “hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters” makes his argument – and the man himself – seem petty, or vindictive, or possibly like a “jellus h8er.” And Huffington’s choice to flaunt HuffPost’s huge numbers as a testament to the site’s quality, or closing her piece with “Ok, back to the merger,” ends up bringing both bold names down to the same level. It is a shame? Should we commence the hand-wringing and reminisce about the “good ol’ days” of journalism? Sure, maybe, as long as that hand-wringing comes with a slideshow.

Ok. Back to watching kitten videos.