Huffington Post

"After two in a half years as a valued member of the Huffington Post team, Rachel Sklar has decided to leave Huffpost after the election in order, as she puts it, "to finally finish that goddamn book!'" wrote Arianna Huffington in a memo announcing Rachel Sklar's departure.

Gawker has the memo.

At the PDF conference about technology and politics, NYU journalism professor and Off the Bus co-founder Jay Rosen once again defended Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist whose access to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton led to two major stories that the national media couldn’t get enough of.

Rosen said that the media was inconsistent for criticizing citizen journalists like Fowler but then picking up on her scoops.

Rosen said quotes from Mayhill‘s story about Obama got “stripped” and then “turned it into hot news.”

“So, check out the ethics of ‘closed fund-raiser' -- eew, so unethical, hot news, great story, here you go Drudge.”

Emily Gould's New York Times Magazine cover story hasn't even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it's already garnering a ton of criticism online.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)  read more »

Is Wired better than The New York Times? According to this year's Webby Awards, when it comes to Best Copy/Writing, it sure is.  read more »

LAObserved's Kevin Roderick points us towards W's profile of Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington. Writer Diane Solway spends some time with Huffington, whom the magazine calls Poster Girl (get it?), but we were just interested in all the other people mentioned by name. (Except in the case of Huffington's household help and employees.)  read more »

Things are getting a bit heated over at the Huffington Post.

Yesterday, Erica Jong called out Rolling Stone's political correspondent Matt Taibbi for making a joke about Hillary Clinton's (allegedly) flabby arms in an April 3 RS column. "Physical mockery ended in seventh grade, I thought—but apparently not where women pols are concerned," Ms. Jong wrote in a piece headlined Misogyny, Momism and Militarism. "I find it bizarre that a grown man would invoke a physical put-down in an opinion piece. It smacks of a complex of some sort."  read more »

Because the gossip weeklies closed their issues this week before Heath Ledger’s death (except for People, which features the late actor on their latest cover), they apparently had to find new ways to keep the rapt public’s attention focused in their direction. Star thought of one particularly unique way of doing this, WWD reports today. The whisper magazine’s editorial director, Bonnie Fuller, guest-blogged about the death over at the Huffington Post, where she would then link back to Star’s Web site for, as she put it, “more coverage of Heath’s life and tragic death.”

But she didn’t stop there. She also turned up the heat by speculating that Mr. Ledger had taken his own life, before an autopsy had even begun. Wrote Mr. Fuller of the actor: “None of his gifts, neither talent nor family, appears to have been enough to combat the demons that apparently led Heath to take the pills that could have ended his young life.”

The autopsy yesterday was inconclusive, so authorities refuse to conclusively confirm or deny that theory. Asked about her suicide conclusion, Ms. Fuller told WWD: “The way I wrote it, I didn't mean to say definitively that it was suicide at all. I felt like I left it open.”  read more »

John Koblin meets twins who blog, discovers that a Ron Paul party distracted Times reporters on deadline, and witnesses an interesting moment involving Hillary Clinton, Bill O’Reilly and a girl with red hair.

MANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 4—A pair of 26-year-old twins, Matthew and Peter Slutsky, are freelancing for The Huffington Post. They make short films and they're up from Washington to document campaign events and to produce what they described as "serious journalism."

But sometimes you only have the material the subjects are giving you.  read more »

Silicon Alley meets marketing meets journalism meets Hollywood: New York is the new capital of content, from Hudson Square to West Chelsea, SoHo to Midtown. Click on the photo for a tour ...

Perhaps despairing of the continuing interest of the traditional media in his office's entanglements with Joe Bruno, Eliot Spitzer has opened up a new public relations front.

He recently posted on the Huffington Post and on Daily Kos, speaking, in theory, directly to one of the most motivated and active parts of the Democratic base (which notably hasn't rushed to Spitzer's defense over the trying past few weeks).

A spokesman for Huffington Post said that they reached out to Spitzer after hearing that he was giving a major speech, and confirmed that yesterday’s item was his first post there.