Ha: a new study (why?) has found that the Huffington Post only gave 23% of its front-page slots to female bloggers—but more than half of those were by Arianna Huffington herself. She knows broads will only screw things up. [FAIR via Mixed Media]

Jeff Jarvis, former TV Guide and People TV critic and founder of Entertainment Weekly, is now an internet expert. He was one of those guys who became internet-famous back when there were like six bloggers, all of whom were guys whom 9/11 turned into HAWKISH ACTION HEROES, and they all brayed about the Islamist Menace and felt quite proud of themselves for being former liberals who grew balls and for some reason none of them went away? (Another one of those guys is Nick Denton!) Anyway! Then he became an internet futurist, which means spending a lot of time gloating about the death of print and babbling about the future of media gallivanting around to conferences and "consulting" and just wasting everyone's time with obnoxious writing and simplistic evangelizing for a miserable digital future. Now he's in an immature fight with Ron Rosenbaum, who is much smarter than he is, if also old and blinkered, about THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM. It's fucking bleak. Rosenbaum just took him down in Slate, partly for his new book about Google that happens to be just made up of things Jeff Jarvis thinks about Google. Here is the important part of the rant:

Did you know that at Huffington Post you are now allowed to use your position as a "blogger" to simply run ads for your own craptastic imaginary version of a ripoff consulting business? It's true! Exhibit A-Z is the new column by "Jack Myers," a "Media futurist" and one of the most jargon-talking jargonists that you may ever hope to jargon with! (Actual bio item: "Jack Myers has nearly 3,000 Facebook friends"). Media futurist Jack Myers interfaces with end users of HuffPo by communicating a strategic column-formed digital word item that "originally appeared at JackMyers.com." Okay Jack hit us with some of your forward-facing media marketing advertising knowledge!: Media futurist Jack Myers knows how to make billions of dollars for the media!

The world belongs to Nate Silver! Briefly. Silver, the number-crunching baseball stat geek who decided to become a political poll-cruncher in his spare time and only turned out to be the most freakishly accurate election predictor ever, is now the toast of the media, Obamaphiles, and stat nerds alike. The Times has even weighed in now, several months behind the curve! Now is your chance to capitalize, Nate; screw this up and you'll soon return to the depths of nerd-only notoriety. After the jump, our professional advice to Nate about building his entire future in five easy steps—five being a number that statistics show gets a lot of page views!: 1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap. 2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too! 3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card. 4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich. 5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope. [Pic via Newsweek]

Square-jawed Fox News host Greta Van Susteren is out to show that the media is not totally in the tank, by giving a fair and balanced interview to Gov. Sarah Palin right in her own back yard! And by that we mean not just "the state of Alaska," but literally "her own back yard." Greta is chronicling her trip to Wasilla on her very own blog, "GretaWire," which allows us all to take an intimate peek into this cross-continental journalistic excursion. Question: On a scale of 1-10, how much of this trip was for "journalism," and how much was for "Whoa, free snowmobile ride!"? Let Greta's own pictures guide you:
EXCLUSIVE PALIN KITCHEN PHOTO!!!!!

Raja Petra Kamarudin, a blogger in Malaysia, will be released from from government detainment today, after having been arrested on September 12th for no reason. Raja Petra is—you'll never guess!—"one of the most vocal critics of the current government," according go the Times. What was the critism that made the government mad enough to lock him up for two months?

The election was called early last night—but not so early that people weren't drunk off their asses, social-networking technology in hand. Many embarrassing and over-earnest prounouncements were Twittered and texted last night. Crying seemed to be a badge of pride for the melodramatic (don't want to see one more blog post about your tears of happiness), and everyone had Something to Say. (We'll admit that we did.) But now we have a snark-break hangover. Hackneyed revelations from the usual suspects were out in force:First off, our notoriously cold-hearted publisher Nick Denton just admitted that he cried last night. "And I'm not even a Democrat!" And there were a thousand different versions of this statement across the blogs: "I am so proud of all of you." Thanks, Mom. Here's another anonoblogging overshare:

What's going on at The Corner, National Review's online peek into the id of the Conservative base? Jonah Goldberg, in his role as television-raised idiot manchild of The Right, has been posting weird movie clips all day. Kathryn Jean Lopez, Fairy Queen of NRO, has just been posting the crazier selections from her amazing inbox. Mark Hemingway doesn't really understand the laws surrounding "politcking" very well. And this is a particularly admirable example of "the polls are wrong" wishful thinking:

Burnout: it happens to the best (and the worst!) of bloggers. Everyone's susceptible—even professional unpaid societyblogger-heiresses like Fifth Avenue Misfit Emily Brill. Her blog was down for like, days! (Everyone has those George Constanza moments where they storm out of work in a huff, only to return the next day pretending like they didn't quit.) We eulogized her and asked her to come back over the weekend, but only for our own snarky, selfish purposes. Now, the Brill is back, bitches ("I took things down for a bit of the timeout"), and she's ready to continue serving as our Ultimate Narrator:

A reader asks, "Emily Gould and Keith Gessen—are they back together?" Emily Gould is a former editor of Gawker who wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about working at Gawker and dating a different Gawker editor who wrote a Page Six Magazine story about dating her. Then she started dating Keith Gessen, whom she'd written about, somewhat critically, on Gawker. Gessen is a novelist who co-founded a literary journal called n+1 and wrote a novel about being a dude named Keith who went to Harvard, like Keith Gessen. The journal and the novel are the Most Important Journal and Novel of Our Time, respectively. They dated, and then they broke up, and then Keith went to Russia, and we stopped writing about both of them, mostly. But apparently you, the readers, demand to know what's up! Here is THE SCOOP: Emily went to visit Keith in Russia. She stayed a month. Now she's back in New York. We suppose that sort of counts as "back together" except now, obviously, they are thousands of miles apart, again. (The kitten we got Keith that he couldn't take because he was going to Russia did find a home.) The End.

CNN just loves to hep it up on election and convention nights by "hosting" bloggers, corralling them into a blogger pen where they can feel like they might actually be part of the MSM, if only for a night. November 4th will be no different—New York dating columnist Julia Allison has already Twittered that she'll be there, unwittingly proving once again how ridiculous (and ridiculously all-inclusive) this little gathering is. After the jump, see the invite to "select bloggers" promising "wireless Internet access and small TVs... And of course, there’s complimentary food and open bar throughout the evening."

What is the saddest thing about the death of Radar? Its current weird zombie TMZ state? The way they locked everyone out of their computers and kicked them out on the streets? Here is a sad and oh-so-poignant symbol of how basically we are all fucked, in this industry: Wonkette founding editor and terribly famous, talented, and successful blogger Ana Marie Cox, who is often on TV and who still writes for Time, has set up a personal fundraising drive whereby donors can pay for her to cover the end of the McCain campaign and receive, in exchange, AMC's AIM screen name and, for big spenders, a post-election dinner! This is, appropriately enough, a political fundraising method, where donors get special access and personal attention for their cash. All it is missing is cute names for each tier, like Bush's "Rangers" and Hillary Clinton's "Hillraisers." As a model for the future of professional journalism, it is perhaps worrying! But you know we're all "marketing" our "personal brands," right? Now we are microtargeting, too. And once we are finally out of work, when Nick Denton decamps to his secret underground fortress to ride out the End Times, we will gladly email you, personally, 200 words on why Rachel Maddow is so popular in exchange for a hamburger. But who will donate to the commenters? The system is unsustainable!

Elizabeth Spiers is doing a new thing! Spiers, the Gawker founding editor-turned-media mini-mogul and closely watched savant of the blog business, is already talking about her next project, which doesn't have financial backers yet. It's going to be an "online magazine" (translation: blog) aimed at women. Uh oh, does that mean she's taking on our sister Jezebel?

Look, yet another good fact has emerged about Rachel Maddow, already the favorite news anchor of elitist coastal liberals simply by virtue of being a normal person (funny how that works!). Whereas most television news personalities are only "engaged" in the internet in the sense that they occasionally glance over their ghost-written blog posts before an underling posts them, Maddow actually made the following statement: "I care about Nielsen ratings, but I also care about Technorati searches.” Is she the future of news media people? Yes she is, and we'll tell you why. Could it be that part of the reason that the online world has so much love for Maddow is that she loves the online world back? It's crazy, but it just might be true! For example, she Tweets. Presumably with her own hands! And you have to figure that her 6,000 Twitter followers include at least several thousand bloggers, some of whom run blogs that are actually influential. Since internet memes often grow out of groupthink, her mere twitterings may have had an outrageously large impact on her positive reputation in the blogosphere, which is now equally influential, in ideas at least, to the mainstream media. Crazy! Further:

Justine Ezarik is a pretty blond girl who calls herself "iJustine" and gets hundreds of thousands of hits on her YouTube videos of her doing completely irrelevant bullshit like shopping or telling boring stories to the camera, because of the fact that young men will generally watch pretty blond girls do anything, which then makes said girl popular, which then attracts young female viewers, who will watch popular girls do anything. Mindless lemmings drawn to reflections of our own vapid selves, we all are. For a more thoughtful exploration of this issue, let's see what former Gawker ed. Emily Gould has to say:

Steve Barnes (pictured), the restaurant critic for the Albany Times-Union, was coming out of a restaurant with a friend last Friday night when, with no warning, two young men walked up nonchalantly and beat them up. "They said nothing, just punched us both repeatedly in the face." Barnes doesn't think he was targeted because he was gay, and he doesn't think he was targeted by the restaurant he just left—but he does think he was targeted:

So, have you been keeping up with these two laid-off 20-something investment bankers who are now giving you their unfiltered perspective online at Bankergonebroke.com? With their newfound free time, they turn up hidden gems about life in the gritty city: "Trader Joe’s at 14th St and 3rd Ave is an oasis in the desert of the Manhattan eating scene," they discover. "At TJ’s, you can find natural organic snacks along with delicious easy to prepare frozen meals. Surprisingly, these meals are also relatively healthy and best of all, cheap." Just goes to show that the best and the brightest can thrive in any environment.

Are you a weary office drone who chokes down a dry, overpriced sandwich from the local deli in front of your computer every day, wishing that you could take a full hour to relax and eat some quality food for once in your miserable life? Well the ConAgra corporation feels your pain! And in order to help you they've enlisted someone you, the little people, can look up to: Ivanka Trump. She is using a modern "blog" to reach all the depressed, overworked potential ConAgra lunch customers! It all began last week, when Ivanka, daughter of The Donald and main squeeze of The Jared Kushner, informed the public via some blog that she would soon be setting up a "lunch trade" to revitalize your boring existence:

BREAKING: Permalinks for Slate blogger Mickey Kaus? After all these years? Sort of.

Newspapers have always been selfish when it comes to giving credit to anybody else for anything. Good reporters are always conscientious about noting when someone else broke a story, but as a rule of thumb, the more self-important a news outlet is, the less likely they are to credit a competitor (or anyone else) for a scoop. But everything has changed now! Thanks to the internet and how it is beating the shit out of newspapers. Are you ready for a revolution in how you consume your news? Click through for a glimpse of the future of information! Newspapers—the forward-thinking beacons of journalism—have invented something totally new. Imagine this: you read the New York Times' website, and, abracadabra, you see a "link." This "link" sends you to a site that is not owned by the New York Times, where you can read information on a certain topic. NBC and the Washington Post are about to start doing it too! This could be big!