Hah! You write three little items about how blog mistress Arianna Huffington is a terror to work for and suddenly you're off the blogroll at the Huffington Post. Seriously! We've had a place on that long list since day one, but today... nothing. And after all we've done for you, Arianna! Need we remind you of that party Nick threw for you when you launched your goofy blog? (The funny thing here is that we've made fun of the content, business plan, other contributors, comments, and tone of the HuffPo for years with impunity, but now it is apparently personal?) Anyway in retaliation we're going to retroactively unpublish all the times Balk mentioned Rachel Sklar's rack. [HuffPo]

♦ Some 66 million tuned in to Tuesday's debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, up from 55 million for the first debate on Sept. 26th. [NYT]
♦ A recap of Michelle Obama's appearances on the Daily Show and Larry King last night. [NYT]
♦ Barack Obama's campaign purchased a half-hour of airtime from CBS for a primetime special on October 29th. [THR]
♦ CBS's Dean Reynolds isn't happy about how the Obama campaign treats the media; fellow reporters take Reynolds to task. [CBS, Radar]
♦ Arianna Huffington: Not such a nice boss! [Gawker]
♦ Haute Living: Not such a fun place to work! [Jossip]

We asked, earlier this week, if "editors are 'retards' and servants to Arianna" Huffington, subject of an all-too-squishy New Yorker profile this week. After hearing from still more Huffington Post insiders, it would seem the answer is a resounding "yes." And an obvious "yes" to those who have come to appreciate that the ambitious divorcée draws few boundaries between her own professional and personal lives, working manically, phoning and emailing editors in the middle of the night, obsessively arranging the order of stories on HuffPo's front page and in its various sections, and hollering at her staff over an intercom in her Brentwood mansion even while she has her nails done. The only clear line, it seems, is between the smart, charming image Huffington projects to her celebrity friends and the world at large and the rather nastier and more careless Arianna seen inside HuffPo.

Most bloggers seem to be mentally competing with the newspaper media model of The New York Times. Were they to visit the average newspaper office, they'd quickly realize what they really want: A glamorous magazine job. That seems to be Arianna Huffington's thinking, too. Gawker writer Ryan Tate has a long, delicious post about Huffington's workplace quirks. But his kicker applies to any blogging biz:

The New Yorker's big Arianna Huffington profile may have been a letdown, with very little dirt on the politics or business of the Huffington Post, as we said yesterday. And, granted, it also failed to establish that the HuffPo publisher is a "cutthroat boss," as the Post hinted it would. But those who have spent time in Huffington's orbit seemed determined to have their say. And so it is that we have come to understand more clearly Huffington's seemingly strange remark that " a lot of people who came to the office wanted to be writers" at HuffPo but left because "the jobs are administrative." That quote left one to wonder if people signed up to be Arianna's administrative assistants and were upset because they couldn't get bylines. But no. People signed up to be editors, we hear, and were upset because they were asked to do the work of household assistants.

The New Yorker published its profile of Arianna Huffington. Though disappointingly far from the juicy takedown we hoped for, it does contain a few interesting nuggets. We learn, for example, that the Republican-divorcée-turned-internet-publisher bizarrely "hides" all three of her BlackBerrys in her bathroom at night, even though she lives only with a housekeeper and her two daughters. Her gay ex-husband Michael Huffington elaborates on how she knew of his interest in men before their marriage, saying, "in my Houston town house I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women and men so that she would be aware of it." And Huffington sounds downright proud of her lack of long-term friendships, saying, "I metabolize experiences fast." But there's so much missing, so much that should be in this 14-page story, starting first with how she runs the Huffington Post — would any male mogul be profiled at such length with so little said about how he runs his business? — and continuing through to juicer questions about her dating life and cultlike religious guru. A few specifics:

Which one of these is Kelly Ripa's real belly-button? Don't know? Don't care? Thankfully we have the Huffington Post to investigate whether the editors at Shape magazine have been playing fast and loose with Ripa's navel. Now she just needs to stand up tomorrow and lift up her shirt and we'll know for sure. [Huffpo]

Haha we were going to write about this and then John McCain flew back to Washington DC to solve this economic crisis himself. Before that happened? People were talking about how either John McCain lied to us about his campaign manager's link to Freddie Mac, or that campaign manager lied to John McCain about those ties, or both. How to respond to that charge? Hah. They didn't really know! Twice today—twice—McCain surrogates responded not by denying any of it, but rather by... comparing the New York Times to the Huffington Post. Ok, what? Nancy Pfotenhauer tried this line first on MSNBC this afternoon. Then spokesman Michael Goldfarb tried it later in an press release. That's right, they are saying you can't believe the Times because it's just like the stupid HuffPo with its Nora Ephron blogs and so on. What? Does this argument resonate with anyone who doesn't live online?? Man, the Washington Post is like the "Pink is the New Blog" of newspapers, right?? That MSNBC is pretty much the MediaBistro of television! Nonsensical zing! One understands why they decided to quickly shift gears this afternoon.

The Huffington Post has a guy who emails me if I typo their URL in a Valleywag entry. So I doubt it's a lack of managerial attention that allowed a brazen advertorial for Thrillist's new Miami edition to run on the HuffPo Tuesday. I wouldn't have noticed if Portfolio hadn't called it out as a violation of the site's own user agreement. But read Portfolio's summary of the situation and ask yourself how many outraged HuffPo editorials would appear if anyone remotely related to Sarah Palin were to get this kind of play on Little Green Footballs:Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici says:

Tina Brown's image as a media power player remains anchored in the 1980s and the 1990s, when she edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She's attempting to change that with an internet venture, the Daily Beast, funded by InterActive Corp. chairman Barry Diller. But an early blunder getting Beast off the ground has left Brown red-faced and more shackled to her past than ever. It seems Brown's big idea for launching her website was — stop us if you've heard this one before — to publish a big list of the most powerful people in Hollywood. "The idea is so 1980s," one source told Nikki Finke. Apparently no one is even bothering to call Brown's staff back as they attempt to report the feature:

• Arianna Huffington says her website is not for sale, but that's probably just because no one is interested in paying $200 million for it. [Gawker]

The Huffington Post is decidedly not for sale, site founder Arianna Huffington announced yesterday in Denver. That means, most likely, that they still can't find any buyer willing to pony up anything close to that $200 million figure that got leaked to the Times. This year, the hard-working HuffPoors broke a couple political stories that decidedly altered the campaign, expanded into another city, and launched lifestyle sections with great fanfare, but let's be honest with ourselves: despite their fantastic skill with PR (thanks to Arianna's charm and moneyman Ken Lerer's experience working the press), the HuffPo is still not worth the paper it's not printed on. Click to viewHere are the two interpretations of The Huffington Post that Arianna and company would like you to forget: "left-wing Drudge Report" and "unedited celebrity Livejournal." The increasingly bloated HuffPo still is mostly an unhealthy mixture of those two things, of course, but their ambitions are higher. They have to be, to justify that ridiculous internal valuation. Hence HuffPo Chicago! And, more importantly, HuffPo Living, full of bullshit local-news quality health stories, "how to beat workplace stress" listicles (or often worse: links to those listicles posted elsewhere), alternative medicine quack-bloggers, and other "grab the apolitical old women" content. (To be fair, this shit does fit in well with Arianna's moony guru-filled California lifestyle, just as the media and political sections compliment her strident populism and personal hatred of the establishment press.) And with entertainment and style sections, HuffPo now calls itself "The Internet Newspaper." Real newspapers across the nation spiral into bankruptcy, but HuffPo's overhead costs are much lower, what with not paying most of their contributors. And also what with not having any original reporting. The site is still another damn aggregator, curating and linking real work done by traditional newsgatherers. With insane raving commenters, of course. And "blogs" from Nora Ephron. [Three years later and they still call each "post" a "blog." This still drives us insane.] This is the point L.A. Times media writer James Rainey makes in his slightly bitter piece on Arianna and the site. "I confess I'm as charmed and amused by the beguiling Ms. H as anyone," he says, "but also slightly queasy about whether her Huffington Post will ever offer original content and reporting that lives up to the hype and pretty packaging." What, you're not happy with featured content like "One Millenial Speaks Out: Why I'm Enrolling in Culinary School"? [Ed. note: we wuz wrong.] But, you know, they're still working on that whole original content that will make their site actually worth what they'd like to cash out thing!

If you happen to be obsessed with Anderson Cooper and/or you're obsessed with the idea that he might somehow be Jewish (he's not), perhaps you'd be interested in this video of the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar asking the CNN anchor about his "Jewish identity"? Watch as Anderson confesses that when he was a kid, he really wanted to be Jewish and go the Hebrew school, so he could be just like all the other boys at Dalton. (Let's skip the obvious joke there, shall we?) As a very special bonus, you'll get to see Anderson spout the first line of a prayer in Hebrew, proving once and for all that he's probably endured more than his fair share of Saturdays at Temple Emanu-El.

A New Yorker journalist is calling around for a story on the "Real Arianna Huffington," the Post reported. The scribe is supposedly asking about the allegedly ballooning value of the Huffington Post, recently pegged at $200 million, and about whether publisher Huffington is a "cutthroat boss." Perhaps the New Yorker writer — former New York Post man Ken Auletta? — should ring up HuffPo senior editor Rachel Sklar, who just last night aired news that Huffington spiked her story about MSNBC because she wants to tightly control how politics is discussed on her site. From Sklar's message on Jim Romenesko's Poynter.org forum:

When John Cusack called us up and asked, "If I answer your questions, will you stop writing nasty shit about me?" we demurred — sadly, he didn't try the same tack with the New York Post. The left-leaning actor is a juicy target for the conservative tabloid, and after Cusack was asked to contribute an essay to the new HuffPost Chicago by his friend, "the good and great Arianna," the Post tore it wide open like a disgruntled Must Love Dogs ticketbuyter. What they allege they've found is a whole host of errors and made-up childhood reminiscences:

Last week the Say Anything actor and Hilary Duff mentor wrote a 732-word celebrity blog post commemorating the launch of Huffington Post Chicago — hey wait I thought the internet meant the end of 'placeness'!? — that contained somewhere between eight and infinity errors. Yeah, and it was about his childhood. Most have been fixed, though they are keeping his misspelling of playwright Eugene O'Neill's name, for authenticity's sake presumably. Page Six picked up the story today, noting that even the non-patently false details of John Cusack's love letter to Chicago sports are disingenuous! But if the blogs are to be believed — and in this case they are pretty credible — Cusack made one error so bad, so grievous, so fundamentally retarded, Page Six apparently couldn't bear to share it with you:He misspelled the name "Michael Jordan." No yes, as one blogger so eloquently noted, "Michael freakin' Jordan!" So here's the thing. Blog mistress Arianna Huffington doesn't exactly make a secret of the fact that she has lots of celebrity friends she sweet-talks into writing pointless celebrity blog posts for her big online benefit dinner; I mean, the whole first paragraph of John Cusack's post is about how Cusack was actually in Bangkok — conjuring images of Jayson Blair filing stories about the DC sniper from the Times cafeteria, a little! — but the relentless blog matron had tracked him down the night before to write the thing and for whatever reason — the accent? because writing an incredibly short sentimental missive on one's childhood is not a very difficult task, trust me? — he dutifully complied. But like, why? And why did Huffpo commission Ryan Reynolds to write that inexplicable rumination on competitive eating that one time? And then all the Jamie Lee Curtis stuff? Why did they even give a bio page to my friend Don? If no one at Huffington Post is reading this shit — at least not closely enough to catch a misspelling of the name Michael freaking Jordan — why are we expected to? Oh right! In the event that someone will make some retarded error that the intermob can point at and say: "Wow, that was retarded!" Great. How about: Emily is right, everyone needs to get off the internet already? But barring that: ever read a celebrity blog post you found to be monumentally pointless and/or error-ridden and/or just deeply inane? Be a dear and send it to me so I can cobble together a pointless listicle! [Page Six]

Look who's started blogging over at the Huffington Post: It's Kate Schelter, ubiquitous fashion/social person whose greatest claim to fame is once having been accused of responsibility for the late, great Socialite Rank. Schelter details the Top 6 shoe trends for fall. But, naturally, she finds space to include a pic of herself, too. [HuffPo]

Heart-warmingly vulgar comedienne Roseanne Barr is making headlines again, and it's with a blog. The LA Times wonders if Barr is drunk when she posts items online after a series of screeds about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. She is, then she obviously understands blogging for what it is: Part self-promotion, part maniacal delusion, and all about making a scene as publicly as possible. The Huffington Post has proven profitable with its own stable of celebrity bloggers and an anti-Republican slant similar to, but far less entertaining than, Barr's — but then, the Huffington post also gets free labor from hundreds of other, less famous bloggers. So why are celebrities in the blogodrome so easy to resent?Because celebrities have every other possible medium in which to broadcast their feelings and opinions, from movies to television, newspapers to magazines. Why would I want to read John Cusack's opinions about why the war in Iraq is bad, when I can go see his terrible movie about it? Either way, I'm almost guaranteed not to laugh. Responding to the brouhaha over her blog, Barr at least makes me chuckle:

• Yet another miserable day for people whose livelihoods depend on ink and paper: Gannett is cutting 1,000 jobs, McClatchy is freezing wages, Cox has put 29 of its papers up for sale, and Tribune is a mess as usual. [Gawker]

You know how you are always saying to yourself "What the world needs now is a website… that would devote itself to chronicling the entertainment industry"? Well, another half million venture capital dollars has found a home trying to do that under the great helmsladyship of ex-New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman. So now it's a trend, this "internet as representing some sort of future for the media" thing! Because Tina Brown told us last week her plans for internet moguldum involve a new website called the Daily Beast, and Bonnie Fuller confirmed she was starting her own new website a few weeks before that, and while Waxman is not, like the two other media divas, internet retarded — she has a blog! — she is a lady, and as with the other two we hope her venture, The Wrap LLC fails because we're sick of having new sites we're supposed to check on the internet.