The three new blogs include The Cutline, a media blog run by Michael Calderone and Joe Pompeo; The Lookout, a blog covering national affairs run by Zachary Roth, Brett Michael Dykes, and Liz Goodwin; and The Ticket, a political blog run by Holly Bailey and Rachel Rose Hartman.

The announcement on the Upshot says:

The Upshot has just given birth to triplets.

Since the site launched in July, we’ve hustled to pull together the most interesting and important news on three core beats: politics, national affairs and media. Our bloggers have broken news and analyzed big stories, pointed out to great stories by other publications, and done our best to offer you a comprehensive media diet.

And you’ve responded. Readers inside and outside of the Yahoo! network have read the site by the millions, shared our stories via email, Twitter and Facebook, and engaged with our bloggers.

So today, we’re launching three new sites dedicated specifically to the topics The Upshot was already covering.

In addition, Advertising Age has a lengthy piece out today about Yahoo’s growth — and struggles — which reveals that although Yahoo! has had layoffs recently on the tech side, they continue to bring in new editorial hires, including Deadspin founder & New York Contributing Editor Will Leitch, who will head up movie coverage. Yahoo also recently hired former Defamer editor Mark Lisanti to head up their entertainment coverage, as well as a number of other bloggers and reporters to fill out their yet-to-launch entertainment and finance blogs.

Although Yahoo is the web’s #1 most-trafficked news site, much of their content has long been syndicated from places like the Associated Press and Reuters.  With the launch of the Upshot and three sister blogs, as well as their growing stable of veteran reporters poached from other media organizations, Yahoo is clearly betting on original content as the key to their success strategy.

Finke, whom hardly anybody in Hollywood knows, but everyone fears, has made a name and a living for herself, in a handsome symmetry, by tearing down the names and lives of Hollywood’s ruling class.  Of course, Finke’s ability to do this is a function of her prodigious, and at times prophetic, reportorial powers.  Above all, Finke is renowned for breaking stories before the principals of these stories even know there is a story.

The HBO comedy is to be written and directed (the exact division of labor was not divulged) by Cynthia Mort and Bill Condon.  Mort recently scored acclaim for her single-season HBO series, the divertingly randy “Love Me.”  Condon, a bigger fish, has won an Oscar and directed “Dream Girls,” but is not yet famous enough to escape near-universal confusion, in the ears of the public, with the popular form of contraception.

Blogging, to put it gently, is not a very visually compelling activity.  Aside from the twitching of fingers (most of them wracked by carpal-tunnel), there is no movement.  What there is, on the other hand, is a lot of stillness.  It requires tons – and by tons, I mean hour upon unrelieved hour – of staring, muted grumbling, and slouching.  The slouching involved in blogging is, really, epic in scale.  Then we come to the sensitive crux of the type of person who is attracted to blogging.  As a species, the blogger tends to be sallow, bitter, and under-exercised.  He couples a quivering narcissism with the husky conviction that the world at large is hurtfully neglecting him.

This, mind you, is the garden-variety blogger, the humdrum nine-to-fiver: not exactly screaming for the screen treatment.  But Nikki Finki is no ordinary blogger.  Even among bloggers, even by their occult standards, Finke is supremely invisible, immobile, and reclusive.  Bitterness is hard to gauge, but when pressed for comment by Defamer about the HBO project today, Finke responded, with classic demureness, “Why are you so F*ING fascinated with me?  Get a life.”  Which gives you a ballpark idea.

The question, then, is what the hell should we expect to happen, frame-by-frame, in “Tilda”?  Aside from a pretext for more chittering about the gold-plated depravities of the Hollywood Hills, what does Nikki Finke – a blogger so tediously committed to the tedium of blogging that even Gawker, blog among blogs, was obliged to her call her out for it – offer a screenwriter?  A frowning session at the swivel-chair, followed by a frowning session at the microwave, succeeded by an even longer frown on the phone, capped and delivered to a climax by a return to the computer, where, frown still intact, she bangs out a few paragraphs of radioactive snark?

Then again, perhaps Finke’s onscreen avatar will be faithful to the mix of bodilessness and omniscience that has defined the Finke of real life – a sort of hybrid of Charlie Townsen and the Wizard of Oz, both everywhere and nowhere, supervising a drama from which she herself stays studiously absent.  Needless to say, we bloggers await “Tilda” eagerly.  The question is, should you?

Rather than resign themselves to that fact, they’ve made a contest of it: the first person to bring them a recent photo of Nikki Finke wins $1000.

From Rushfield’s post:

Everybody complains about the weather but Gawker is ready to do something about it. We hereby offer a $1000 bounty to the first person who can produce a web-ready, usable, recent photograph of Nikki Finke, sparing media consumers of the future another thousand go-rounds with Evil Headmistress.

We encourage bounty seekers to pursue the prize through all legal and honorable means; please no urban ninja tactics and remember the laws of the land still apply, even to Hollywood picture-takers. But surely someone out there has or will seen her, or seen a picture and can help save the web from this terrible drought.

Maybe there’s a future trend piece here! TMZ has reportedly been paying for tips forever, and Eater is offering $25 to food bloggers to shut down their blogs and $100 to Gourmet feature writers for their unpublished work. Web publications are discovering that it takes money to make money, as Dilbert’s boss might say? But Gawker’s known that for a while.

Finke, of course, has been in the headlines lately both for recently selling her site to Mail.com and for viciously taking down The New Yorker over a recent profile of her. She dismissed New Yorker EIC David Remnick as a “New Jersey dentist’s son,” and said the reporter who wrote the piece, Tad Friend, was “easy to manipulate.” Surely she deserves a better photo to go with that mystique?

Who needs news when we have Megan? Her new movie, “Jennifer’s Body,” premiered this weekend, and everyone with a pen is itching to write about the film’s star.

After Rolling Stone posted a gallery of Megan Fox photos shot for the October 1 issue but withheld the text to draw paid subscriptions, everyone from the Daily News to Perez Hilton has begun reporting on the Rolling Stone feature. Defamer’s Richard Rushfield has a great round-up of the coverage of the coverage.

Meanwhile, the writer behind the movie, Diablo Cody, has her own idea of stimulus:

Related:
Our idea of stimulus: 800 pairs of Megan Fox’s Boobs

See the “Jennifer’s Body” Trailer here.

Cody on Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen this morning (below).