In your famous Friday media column: exclusive thoughts from Steven Brill on the future of paid online newspapers, Rebecca Dana gets a new job, newspapers die and thrive, and Bill Keller will never be on the Daily Show again.

Wait, this can't be right.

Here's a question both Arianna Huffington and Guest of a Guest blog mogul wunderkind Rachelle Hruska want to know: Why pay for something - or for them, content - when you can get it for free? Like slavery, but different!

Grow up, liberals. Sarah Palin gave a 15-minute introduction to Michael Reagan at some event last week, and the HuffPo has discovered that some of the words she used belong to Newt Gingrich!

Would you like to pay $13,000 for the privilege of doing free work for a website for a couple months? Too bad, kid, because the next minimum bid on the HuffPo internship is $15,500.

A Michael Bloomberg appointee wrote one little essay for the Huffington Post about how Beverly Hills Chihuahua was the only good thing about dirty-ass Mexico, and now she's been forced to resign. Fuckin' Mexicans, amirite?

Oh, good, Arianna Huffington is using her "Huffingtontowne Evening Post-Gazette" to promote the idiotic vaccine conspiracy nonsense of Earth Girls Are Easy star Jim Carrey.

Former Huffington Post 'blog editor' Francis Wilkinson wrote a column about how no one pays people to write, anymore, so writing is once again just a hobby of the comfortable, but then he basically admitted that it's all his fault:

Mickey Kaus seems to think that the fact that HuffPo's unpaid contributors and underpaid staffers aren't unionized is proof that unions are Bad and Don't Work and are Bad for America.

"You are being lied to about pirates," a HuffPo headline declares. They... they didn't talk like Charles Laughton? (Or Keith Richards?) No, he is talking about those nutty Somali pirates!

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.

On the heels of reports her megablog Huffington Post has received $15 million in venture capital funding, Arianna Huffington got the SNL treatment last night, and it was...really tame. New performer Michaela Watkins captured the details of the HuffPo founder as well as she did in her audition tape, but it missed out on so much of what's really meaningful about Arianna — you know, callous mistreatment of those under her employ, and a fondness for cults. Click for Ms. Watkins — and Arianna's — Weekend Update debut.Click to view She got the accent and nonsense-making fairly right, but what about Arianna's legendary pettiness? Hopefully next time we see Arianna, she'll be huddled over three BlackBerrys in her bathroom sobbing. All things considered, we preferred the original audition:

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 branching out and branching out some more! Fresh off her adventurous night subbing as the host of Rachel Maddow's show, the accented mogul (and current non-friend to us) announced today that the Huffington Post "is going to raise money to fund investigative journalism projects." How does she plan to come up with the cash for this, the most expensive type of reporting? She won't say! Yet. According to Reuters, she said there won't be any details for three months. Perhaps in that time the economy will improve and donors will look to throw money at investigative journalism? Ha, no. So where will this cash come from? Some guesses:

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]

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!

Not Your Average Bear. Family Guy spinoff The Cleveland Show has received a full-season order from Fox, but has been pushed all the way to Fall. In another announcement we totally saw coming, THR reports that "Arianna Huffington will join the cast in a recurring role as the [talking] matriarch of a bear family," who says things like, "Da eeconomeec game is not supposed to be rrrigged like some shaydee ring toss on a carneeval midway. Now who vould like another helping of flopping sah-mon?" [THR]

Prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Lynn Forester de Rothschild, of the noted international finance and banking Rothschilds, recently endorsed John McCain because Barack Obama was, in her words, too "elitist." How elitist is he? He is so elitist, he would like to raise the marginal tax rate the highest brackets pay by four percent, to 39%. This is elitist socialism. Elitist socialism that leads to free money for elitist non-tax-paying poor people. As Rothschild points out at the Huffington Post today:

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]

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]