First, Billy Joel's wife Katie Lee Joel failed at hosting Top Chef. Then, she failed at attending P. "Sean" Diddy Combs' annual "White Party" by showing up wearing cream. And now, in a post that teases her forthcoming cookbook Katie's Comfort Table, she has failed at writing for the Huffington Post. Which, you wouldn't even think could be possible!
Fishbowl watch: Simon Dumenco at AdAge slams Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post a second time for not paying their bloggers. But for most of Huffington Post's celebrity contributors, a blogger's paycheck wouldn't be worth the time it would take to cash it. HuffPo seems to be doing all right, which means the real compensation for a post there is the kind of in-crowd recognition that can't be bought.
"God bless you!" wrote Steve Almond's editor Julia Cheiffetz to me, after we ran a long excerpt from Steve's new essay collection, effectively shoving the book into the consciousness of at least the 6,966 readers who clicked on the post and who may not have previously known of its existence. Today, Steve writes on the Huffington Post that "Until a few weeks ago, I'd never paid much attention to Gawker. I had a vague sense that they were a gossip website that had something to do with New York. Then my editor sent me a link to a post they wrote about me. As it turned out, they'd been talking shit about me for a while."
"Erick, where do you get these revelations from? IPO? Just because a still money losing pure content company gets a new CEO? Thanks for bringing this great analytical mind to bear on TechCrunch." A commenter to new TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld on his post about an IPO for political blog network Huffington Post. [TechCrunch]
The new editor at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, has gotten a little IPO-crazy in these heady days of Bubble 2.0. The best guess we've seen on a Huffington Post valuation is $60 million which, for a media company, is a drop in the bucket. We can't remember a tech or media company going public with a valuation anything like that. Huffington Post is the most unlikely IPO candidate since Wired in 1996 — and Wired had substantially more revenues and a real magazine business. Maybe we were onto something with the whole cheese thing. More likely? An acquisition.
At PaidContent, Rafat Ali picked up this interesting fact from a perfunctory USA Today profile of Arianna Huffington: Her company, The Huffington Post, has raised another $5 million in financing. With blogging companies in vogue with big media, though, that strikes me as small change. Huffington doesn't even pay most of her celebrity bloggers, so it's not clear what she would need the money for. But one wonders why she didn't take more money off the table. Could it be that, despite all the buzz, the Post's blog-for-free business model isn't all that hot?
Huffington Post's Esther Wojcicki gushes over Google's Lunar X Prize. It's not the $30 million those nice Google boys, Larry and Sergey, are offering whomever can successfully land a rover on the moon. This Palo Alto schoolmarm is keen on all the teaching tools the Lunar X Prize is providing educators. She writes, "The team at the Lunar Xprize has prepared free learning guides, videos and other resources to help stimulate student interest not only in space but in math, science and technology as well." She sees this as an effort to rectify the "anti-science trend in schools." Google's efforts are all well and good, but there's another reason why this journalism teacher is so sweet on Larry Page and Sergey Brin — she's Brin's mother-in-law. Her daughter Anne married him in May. But the Google ties go even deeper. Her daughter Susan Wojcicki is Google's VP of product managementand Susan's garage in Menlo Park served as the search engine's first headquarters. Even daughter Janet is married to a former Googler.
For whatever reason, 23/6, the long-gestating humor blog collaboration between Barry Diller's IAC and The Huffington Post, has gone live on the HuffPo website. (The 23/6 domain itself remains password-protected.) The production has been described as "an online alternative to NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' or Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show'" but if what we're seeing here is any indication, we're pretty sure that Lorne Michaels isn't exactly crapping his pants in fear right now. Every joke feels strained, obvious, and rewritten to the point that all the humor has been drained from it (which is, we guess, the "Saturday Night Live" model): The whole thing makes VH1 webortion 24Sizzler read like a model of Lenny Bruceian comedic brilliance, and that site is such a disaster that the mentally retarded are suing to ensure that no one thinks they're its intended audience.
"I want to apologize to all the black tech bloggers. It could have been any ethnic group. It could have been gay guys, could have been Jews, could have been micks, skinnies, chinks, any of them...It was just your guys' bad luck that it went down that way...I'm a fucking idiot comedian and I did this." When PodTech promised to sign on more "professional producers," did it mean a white guy putting on a blackface minstrel show? Because that's what PodTech talent Loren Feldman has been up to, as part of a freakish little "opera" this videoblogger has engineered over the past week. Here's the story as told in videos, from "TechNigga" to Loren screaming, "No balls on any of you, you're just fucking sheep."
"We're trying to be a news organization — we're fair," [Salon CEO Joan Walsh] said, leaving the inference clear that Huffington Post is more slanted toward opinions. Walsh also insists that Salon plays its politics down the middle, although anyone who reads it — of either political stripe — would beg to differ.
Yesterday, our friends at the lovely Huffington Post ran an item about us, sort of! It was about how this silly company we work for is supposedly starting a "sci-fi" blog. It ran on the HuffPo Media page, which, it turns out, is not the same as their Eat The Press page, for no reason known to us. Also it was without byline. So, as a way of saying hi, and maybe digging passive-aggressively for a little dirt, but also just being all Silicon Alley new media friendly, I sent over an email to Elinor Shields, who came to the Huffington Post as their managing editor back in January from BBC.com.
Tourists and teenagers outside the Time Warner Center last night clutched digital cameras, all hoping to get their very own photograph of John Mayer or America Ferrara as they arrived to celebrate the Time 100—the Most Influential People in the World! (One assumed that crowd was less interested in arrivals such as Dr. Henry Kissinger.) Inside, the scene was more of the same: dozens of professional photographers jockeying for position, a crowd of onlookers. It seemed appropriate that the Time Warner Center is just a big mall. The scene could have been one that gets played out in Tallahassee and Des Moines and Houston every time Miss USA comes to town. We took tourist-photos too, with Nikola Tamindzic, who has even more.
Perhaps no one was more eager to leave the dinner than David Geffen and Arianna Huffington: Geffen and Huffington bolted super early and were already in his jet before the dinner had ended. One person who approached Arianna to chat as she was leaving the dinner got the cold shoulder. "Darling, I would love to talk, but I'm getting a ride back with David on his plane." (Oh, and Huffington's efforts to hide her black right eye with bangs didn't fool everyone. She earned the bruise recently when she passed out and hit her head on a desk.)
Huffington Post/Radarite Peter Hyman takes a look at how the Joe Dolce-out-at-Star story played out:
Some lucky MoveOn members received an exciting email today from their friends at the Huffington Post:
Lawyer turned reporter Melissa Lafsky went big over on The HuffPo today, with a story about the pink weekly New York Observer. Big news! Tomorrow marks the re-launch of the paper as a tabloid—plus a new web site!
