Who were the hugely tacky snobs at the International Debutantes Ball in New York last night? Many were from Texas. One is Arianna Huffington's daughter!

Seeing Arianna Huffington in the LA Times Sunday, someone who has worked for the internet publisher tipped us to a purported lookalike: Ursula from the Little Mermaid. Mean and juvenile! But maybe appropriate!

Other publishers are cutting back on holiday parties and bonuses, but not Arianna Huffington! It's designer sweaters for her long-suffering employees again this year. So long as they do an advertorial "thank you."

Arianna Huffington may have raised $25 million last month, but with her traffic tanking post-election, the Huffington Post publisher is clinging to old desperation tactics. Like straight jacking other people's content.

The Huffington Post announced just weeks ago that it had landed $25 million in new investments. Now, their traffic is (predictably) plunging. Arianna Huffington's dealmaking abilities are awesome.

Back when Arianna Huffington founded the Huffington Post, she promised a blogging free-for-all where Washington D.C.'s best and brightest would rub virtual shoulders with megawatt Hollywood movie stars. Three years later, the site's political promise has been fulfilled, but HuffPo can boast little in the way of celebrities aside from ponderings written by the other brother on Wings, pre-emptive "I Didn't Do the Nanny" missives from Rob Lowe, and the occasional drop-in by Charlotte's husband from Sex and the City. And then, for some reason, there is Candy Spelling.

♦ Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch goes on sale tomorrow, as you probably know thanks to the torrent of coverage over the past couple of days. Among the juiciest bits: Murdoch despises Bill O'Reilly, his wife Wendi Deng occasionally reads his email, and he's fond of sleeping pills. [NYT, Gawker, Politico, NYO, Portfolio]
♦ The third quarter of 2008 was a punishing one for newspapers. Ad revenue plunged 18.11 percent, the steepest decline in four decades. [E&P]
♦ Tina Brown's pick for host of Meet the Press: Rachel Maddow. [TDB]
♦ Four Christmases was No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, racking up an estimated $31.7 million in ticket sales. [THR]

We were impressed last month when it was rumored that the Huffington Post may have raised $15 million in new investment, a big accomplishment for a media company at a time when the media economy is in the trash. Well, those rumors turned out to be false. Actually, HuffPo has raised $25 million from a venture capital firm. Amazing. So what will they do with all this cash?

According to some reports, the Huffington Post has raised $15 million in a new round of investment. But nobody really knows for sure whether that's true, yet! Let us say right up front that if it is true—and the Times UK says it is—this will be the coup of the media meltdown. Raising cash like that in this economic environment is impressive, and we would have to tip our hats to HuffPo, and acknowledge that we have wildly underestimated them. Here are all of the details from various reports on Arianna's maybe-triumph:

Arianna Huffington is guest-hosting Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC tonight, and the lineup looks impressively ambitious: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, stat-whiz Nate Silver and Cory Booker, the Newark mayor to whom the internet publisher was once rumored romantically linked (absurdly, her staff thought). The high-profile lefty gig is an appropriate laurel for an ambitious woman whose left-leaning site produced landmark coverage and gangbusters traffic amid the 2008 election. But as former Huffington Post staff can attest (and have), television appearances also mean a frenzy of last-minute research for editors like Roy Sekoff or Colin Sterling who prepare Huffington's talking points. With an entire, hourlong show to host, rather than a brief guest appearance, it would be reasonable for staff to fear another of the screaming, teary emotional breakdowns described to us by several former HuffPo staffers.

What about the children? Palo Alto High School teacher Esther "Woj" Wojcicki took time away from educating future reporters to write about America's teens for the Huffington Post. In the piece, she promotes a nonprofit letter-writing project sponsored by Google and touts the use of Google Docs. No surprise there: Woj, whose daughter Anne is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin and whose daughter Susan is a Google executive, has been promoting Google's pet causes from the first. But only now, after Valleywag has twice pointed out Woj's failure to disclose family conflicts of interest, has she started to include a disclaimer. Too bad it's deceptive.Woj's new disclaimer reads:

New York City Mayor-for-life Michael Bloomberg is bringing his Midas touch to the ailing media industry! In the form of a year-long study sponsored by the city. It's not that Bloomberg, who got rich running his own quasi-media company, has a soft spot for newsprint; it's that there are 160,000 media jobs in NYC, according to the Observer, and it would be beneficial for the municipal tax base not to allow them to crumble away in the face of a changing economy. The question is, can the city actually do anything about it?

It was inevitable that the Huffington Post would somehow end up sullied by recruiting such a massive army of unpaid contributors. But few would have imagined something this awful: Valued HuffPo political blogger Carol Anne Burger shot herself Friday, and police now believe she was responsible for the brutal murder of her former lover two days earlier. Burger was a scuba-diving instructor who brought an amateur's zeal to her work, and in this sense embodied the best of HuffPo's democratic approach, calling to mind fellow contributor Mayhill Fowler, who broke the "Bittergate" story. But the website will not be eager to associate itself with Burger's energy in dispatching Jessica Kalish.

♦ Campbell Brown is reportedly pregnant. [TVNewser]
♦ Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown aren't in competition. They're best friends! [NYT]
♦ The Robb Report is on the market. The price? "Upwards of $100 million." [Folio]
♦ NBC has exiled the struggling Lipstick Jungle to Friday nights. [Variety]
♦ CNN's new (and appallingly unfunny) political humor show starring D.L. Hughley debuted this past weekend. [NYT]

It is easy to be so taken by Arianna Huffington's charm and personal history that one loses sight of the big picture. Just ask the New Yorker's Lauren Collins, whose profile of the Huffington Post publisher had too much on Huffington's yoga and sleeping habits and not enough about how she operates her business. The Times, too, seems to be overly concerned with personal narratives this morning, educating readers at length about how Huffington and royalist competitor Tina Brown went to fancy London parties together in the 1970s and both dated older men, so they're friendly rather than cutthroat competitors. Whatever. The real question: How is either of these money-losing publishers going to attract advertising?

The "voting" bit of the endless 2008 election has not yet happened, but honestly the winner of that particular contest is of little concern to anyone but plumbers and unemployed auto workers and ladies who want their precious "abortions." No, from here, two weeks out from Election Day, with Obama suspending his campaign and John McCain abandoning swing states, we can already plainly see who's really come out on top over these last couple months. Media whores! And, you know, media people who we actually like and wouldn't therefore call "whores." After the jump, the five real winners of the 2008 elections.

Arianna Huffington for many years sought to downplay the extent of her involvement in the Movement For Spiritual Inner Awareness, a cult ex-members described as sexually and financially exploitive in a series of Los Angeles Times exposés in the 1980s and 1990s. During her then-husband's 1994 U.S. Senate run, the Greek-born socialite claimed movement founder John-Roger (pictured with her at a 2004 book party, left) was a mere friend, and pictures of him holding her daughter were ordered withheld from the group's newspaper, the editor later said. But the Huffington Post editor-in-chief is an ordained "Minister Of Light" in the group and once described John-Roger to Interview as her "way-shower." She relaxed a bit in the New Yorker's Oct. 13 profile , admitting she had been too "defensive" about John-Roger, and allowing writer Lauren Collins to listen to a guided MSIA meditation stored on Huffington's iPod. But she wasn't entirely forthcoming. What about the role she has fashioned for her cult in HuffPo staff development?

To hear present and former Huffington Post employees tell it, the liberal website owes its ridiculously high turnover mainly to founder Arianna Huffington's tendency to use staffers to perform menial personal chores, to an internal culture of nasty screaming and name-calling and to a generally chaotic management structure, such as it is, subservient to Arianna's rapidly-changing whims. But Rachel Sklar managed to last a jaw-dropping two-and-a-half years at HuffPo, a rare achievement that saw her become one of the site's highest-profile editors and a frequent cable-TV talking head. Why would management, as our tipster claims, push Sklar out? Read between the lines in the memo after the jump.

What a Drag: Apparently someone at the Huffington Post doesn't take too kindly to Denis Leary's attempts to walk back his controversial comments on autism — at least, if this inexplicable picture of Leary in a dress is any indication. What, is the photo editor the ghost of Bill Hicks? [HuffPo]

Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast last Monday, a fact you're undoubtedly aware of by now thanks to Tina's unrivaled talent for drumming up media attention. The Barry Diller-backed site is a news aggregator—or as Brown prefers to describe it, a site that "sifts, sorts and curates" the web—a concept that isn't all that original considering there are half a dozen sites that do precisely the same thing, most notably Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, which was widely described as Tina's primary competitor last week. But it isn't Huffington who is most concerned with Brown's arrival on the new media scene. That distinction goes to Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and author who founded the buzz-less aggregation site called Newser.com a year ago.