Well, now it’s official: Several Huffington Post contributors have come together to launch a lawsuit against the site. The suit comes after weeks of very public complaints about the lack of monetary compensation bloggers have received in the wake of HuffPost’s $315 million deal with Aol.

Will the last national news host or anchor to leave the national spotlight please turn off the lights? On a day when the opinion media world was focused on Glenn Beck‘s seemingly sudden departure from his Fox News program, reports have surfaced that NBC has been told that Today Show co-host Matt Lauer will be leaving the show when his contract expires at the end of next year.

Time magazine’s annual “Time 100″ list is live today, highlighting 2010′s most influential people. Unsurprisingly, the list includes several big media names, proving once again that those who bring you the news continue to be quite adept at making the news.

In case your day has yet to been made completely miserable, allow us to remind you that it happens to be “April Fools’ Day.” Yeah, we know: Blegh. The Huffington Post decided to get in the holiday spirit, as it were, by telling readers about a brand new feature they’ve just introduced: digital subscriptions to HuffPost especially for New York Times employees. (This is the part where you go “Teehee!”)

Arianna Huffington sat down with The New York Times to discuss pleasant topics like whether her father, a former newspaperman, would feel about accusations that her site is responsible for that whole death of print thing we keep reading about in newspapers.

The Times 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: That HuffPost is too “lefty.”

Researchers from U.C. Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center developed a survey to find out just how individual Huffington Post bloggers feel about the site’s payment system – especially in light of its $ 315 million Aol deal.

Tina Brown isn’t too worried about bloggers weighing in on her latest project – remaking the ailing Newsweek brand into something people will read, discuss and pay for. In an interview with The Guardian, Brown takes the criticism hurled her way (which includes a rather unfortunate and problematic comparison to a hagfish by Gawker editor [...]

Looks like the golden era of bipartisanship at the Huffington Post has ended, no more than two weeks after it started. The publication turned many heads after agreeing to publish a post by conservative rabble-rouser Andrew Breitbart on the recent NPR/James O’Keefe kerfuffle, initially standing by the editorial decision. In light of Breitbart’s recent comments on Van Jones, however, HuffPo spokesman Mario Ruiz announced today they would no longer promote him.

First PopEater, then the world. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, who recently sold the brand to Aol for $315 million, is taking steps to expand the Huffington Post beyond the U.S.

There are several perks to being Arianna Huffington: For one, she’ll never have to search her couch cushions for enough change to buy a two piece and a biscuit. (Not that we’ve ever!) Plus, she also gets to have some pretty famous friends, like Nora Ephron, who do some pretty snazzy things, like host dinner parties in her honor.

Arianna Huffington decided to respond to Bill 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

“The world conspires to convince me of my significance,” writes The New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, running through the numerous “most influential” lists he’s made.

Keller elects to use this influence to weigh in on The Future of Journalism in a much-discussed op-ed piece, tackling a specific issue that keeps popping up in discussions on what tomorrow might hold for those who report on – and make – the news: Content aggregation. And he sets his sights squarely on a name that has become synonymous with this “style” of presenting news online.

The Huffington Post has announced a slew of new hires this morning, marking the first wave of hires to its reporting team since teaming up with Aol. Chances are, you’ll recognize some of the names in the bunch.

For instance, Michael Calderone (pictured), formerly Yahoo’s senior media reporter, has been named HuffPost’s new senior media reporter.

On Friday, Parker/Spitzer co-host Kathleen Parker announced that she is leaving the show. In a guest column, John Ziegler, radio host, Palin confidante, and the filmmaker behind Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted, offers his commentary on Parker’s departure from CNN.

Michael Arrington took to TechCrunch (which, you may recall, was acquired by Aol late last year) to discuss a memo from Aol CEO Tim Armstrong on changes facing the company in the wake of its recent, and much-publicized, acquisition of Arianna Huffington‘s Huffington Post. As past of the move, Huffington will oversee editorial across several of Aol’s blogs.

The memo comes on the heels Aol’s former president media David Eun announcing that he is resigning from the company, which Armstrong chalks up to the realization that “there wasn’t a fit for what he is looking for at this point in his career.”

Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert has jumped on the online news aggregation bandwagon with the launch of his new site, “The Colbuffington Post.”

On his “Tip of the Hat / Wag of the Finger” segment last night, Colbert explained that The Huffington Post is worth every penny of the $315 million Aol shelled out for it, but noted that a good portion of HuffPo’s coverage deals with none other than Stephen Colbert, placing him in the unique situation of growing angry while looking at pictures and videos of himself. Why, then, shouldn’t Colbert get a cut of HuffPo’s sweet, sweet Aol money?

The effects of AOL’s recent acquisition of The Huffington Post on the media landscape is a hotly-debated topic these days, and the ramifications are being felt by AOL’s flagship political blog, Politics Daily. Many current (and some former) PD writers have expressed anxiety about the site’s future under Arianna Huffington‘s control, so Politics Daily Executive Editor Carl Cannon, speaking directly with Mediaite, has responded to some of those concerns.

The Huffington Post is known for, among other things, not paying its contributors. Following news that Aol had purchased HuffPo and taken on its founder, Arianna Huffington, as the head of editorial across several of its blogs, some wondered whether this meant either that HuffPo / Aol would now begin compensating its writers. The answer, for now at least, seems to be simple: Hell no.

The post-Super Bowl news drop that AOL and the Huffington Post were merging into the most bizarre internet media conglomerate in recent memory took most of those in the news world by storm, and the Fox News Watch panel appeared as confused as anyone else. While many questioned the size of the merger and the potential impact on content already part of the AOL media network, the main question for the Fox News Watch team concerned Arianna Huffington‘s recent comments on objectivity– namely, that she practices it.

Although Huffington has insisted that she sees a left / right dichotomy as “an obsolete way of looking at the problems America is facing,” it would appear that the criticism is getting to her as she prepares to take on her new role at Aol.

Today, she asked her Twitter followers whether it is “‘left’ to accurately report that ‘Obama’s Big Budget Cut Proposals Target The Poor?’”

Given that Arianna Huffington was appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher just days after her Huffington Post got bought up by AOL for $315 million, it seemed a near-lock that subject would be the highlight of their conversation. But instead, the most eye-opening part of their chat might have been what Huffington didn’t say – namely, that she wouldn’t rule out voting for someone other than Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Surveying the media landscape in the aftermath of yesterday’s $315 million deal bringing the Huffington Post to Aol, the Los Angeles Times‘ Tim Rutten has concluded journalism is “the loser.” Using plenty of colorful images (“To grasp the Huffington Post’s business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”), Rutten describes the merger as a means to “push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.”

With many still buzzing about the deal between AOL and The Huffington Post, the speculation over what website might be gobbled up next is running rampant, with even a New York Times blog suggesting that Gawker Media could be next. There are many reasons why this is not likely to occur, one of which is that Gawker’s founder Nick Denton exhibits an entirely different, less spotlight-hungry personality than Arianna Huffington.

Aol’s Politics Daily blogger Matt Lewis reacted to news of his employer’s new purchase and, in a sense, new hire by making a firm decision: He’s leaving. Not only that, but he’s leaving for perennially bow-tied pundit Tucker Carlson‘s conservative-leaning news and opinion site, the Daily Caller.

With so much attention being given to the recent deal between Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and Aol, it’s worth it to see what sort of impact this has on other media companies – namely, the recent merger between Newsweek and Tina Brown‘s Daily Beast.