Christmas almost came early this year for Mashable's Ben Parr. Ben, you've got to tell us who this was. Pay the gift forward.

And dysfunctional family recriminations came early this holiday season for recently departed Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Dana.

Listen people, when you see Matt Cutts of Google — yes, that Matt Cuts — in the supermarket, or maybe at Cannes, or just straight bathing in groupie adulation by the pool, remember to just be cool, like it's not a huge emotional deal for you. Resist the urge to take his picture and sell it for six figures to OK!.

Somewhere in this tweet, about a no-doubt fascinating conversation between a woman blessed by genetics and familial luck into a lifetime of opulent wealth, and a rapper who overcame a childhood in the ghetto and repeated music industry swindles by dint of sheer hard work, determination and musical aptitude — somewhere in that exchange at a record executive's holiday party is a full book, if not a movie. Just try and imagine how this might have gone, dialog wise.

It takes literally decades to work up to a passively braggy tweet of this caliber. Watch Arianna and learn.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

The move creates a fabulous new ladder of ascent for aspiring young dreamers looking to scale the heights of the LA swanky cocktail party-centric web journalism.

The Grazer Cultural Attaché slot is one of Hollywood's most-fabled sinecures. The job as it, has been described, focuses around bringing in the great thinkers of the land to meet with the greatest producer of our times for a free-wheeling meeting of the minds. Past great minds wrangled over the years are said to include Jonas Salk, Edward Teller and author Malcolm Gladwell as well as less renowned professors and thinktank dwellers who've been wheedled into showing off their knowledge wares beneath Grazer's Beverly Hills throne.

While the responsibility of genius-wrangling has been traditionally assigned to a one (or in recent months, a couple) Imagine employees, former workers describe the process as consuming the entire office, with all employees brainstorming and submitting a list of names for Grazer himself to whittle down.

In May of last year, when Brad Grossman, Grazer's former CA stepped down, an email seeking his successor was widely circulated and reported on. The email contained the following job description:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that's going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically... They're also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week... an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk... There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he's interested in. You'll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe-teaching him anything he asks you about along the way... You will also be provided with an assistant... Salary is around $150,000 a year... You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

The task of finding his own "architect" however, finding a mind worthy of the being his personal Karl Rove, may have been too much for the The Klumps producer. Grazer gave an interview to, ironically, to the Huffington Post last December in which he claimed himself attaché-free. He said:

That was sort of a joke title. I've been out meeting different people, I have a record, for 24 years, of meeting someone every two weeks. It helps inform your filter and hopefully informs your taste. I don't have anyone that's doing that for me right now. I use a couple of my assistants and I just say 'hey, can I meet so-and-so' and then we work on it or I'll call them myself, but I don't have a person that does that any longer.

Considering to whom he was speaking, Grazer may just have been wanting to hide his attaché from Arianna's potentially poaching claws. Whether the title was formally bestowed upon him or not, sources tell us that Silverman, who had been Grazer's assistant, was in fact acting in the Karl Rovean role. For a cultural attaché to leap out of that heady role after little more than a year at most, seems a bit abrupt, but perhaps once you have tasted the air at those heights, it is hard not to climb ever higher, right into the eagle's nest of all showbiz self-congratulation, The Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington has allowed her editors to run ultra-close ups of the aging body of Vogue's Anna Wintour ("what does she really look like?") and now actresses Lindsay Lohan ("unedited" and splotchy) and Elizabeth Hurley (a bit sweaty). It's a case of her unprofitable company's need for monetizable, non-political Web traffic (read: cheap celebrity clicks) running headlong into Huffington's need to suck up to celebs, who write for her site and come to her parties and help her seem very glamorous.

We won't lecture Huffington on her company's too-often-shoddy attempts to make money in the online publishing racket. At least, not in this post. But we will keep her honest: If Huffington is going to run unedited pictures of others, it's only fair there should be some unedited pictures of her out there.

Click any of the images below to pop-up large, hi-res versions. (Warning, this may slow down your web browser and ruin your lunch.) We've played by HuffPo rules: Posed, red carpet pictures with no editing. We've also excerpted a highlight, as Huffington did with Wintour.

UPDATE: Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky notes that the first chapter of Huffington's book On Becoming Fearless is about positive body image. Plastering someone's picture on HuffPo is certainly one way to nudge that person toward becoming "fearless."

Of course, 24/7 Wall Street has the advantage of being able to conjure made-up estimates out of thin air; that's how the site put a price tag on various blog networks back in February (PerezHilton.com: $32 million (ha); Gawker Media: $170 million (HA!)). Now the site's taken those made-up estimates and combined them with additional made-up estimates of how much each blog network would be worth without its iconic founder. In other words, it's estimating the economic worth of each blogging boss — not to be confused with their actual wealth.

Here are the numbers. Spoiler: Drudge is king, even in hypothetical death.

(Correction: This post originally said 24/7 Wall Street was an AOL property. It is in fact independent.)

Gawker Media's Nick Denton: $26 million. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but it's only 15 percent of his company's hypothetical net worth, since Denton doesn't do much writing or editing. "Gawker would miss the guiding hand, but presumably the company could get another skilled CEO." (Pic: Eliot Shepard via mednut on Flickr)

Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington: $23 million. Huffington is the face of her company, 24/7 correctly notes, lending it valuable "star power and relationships." But the site overestimates the extent to which Huffington has delegated control to "highly skilled editorial staff:" although she's made some promising recent hires from the likes of the Washington Post, Huffington has stocked the wide-ranging site with nepotistic hires willing to abide her detailed (headlines, story placement, story assignments) and wide-ranging orders. As such, she's probably at least twice as essential to the organization as 24/7 estimates (25 percent of HuffPo's $90 million net worth). (Pic: JD Lasica)

Drudge Report's Matt Drudge: $43 million. That's 90 percent of his site's estimated $48 million value. Sure, Drudge has in the past received help from swell guys like Andrew Breitbart (no longer working for him), but they hardly had the skill to open email messages containing Republican talking points and newsroom leaks: "Drudge obviously has editors working for him to gather the hundreds of links from other media but the scoops that run on the sites are almost certainly his."

PerezHilton.com's Mario "Perez Hilton" Lavandeira: $30 million. The jizz-doodling celebrity gossip blogger is obviously an irreplaceable genius i 24/7's eyes: Without him, says the website, "the $32 million value of PerezHilton.com would go to under $2 million." Right, except for the fact that Lavandeira's got his sister and probably others actually writing/doodling the damned thing on his behalf. And since 1> Perez Hilton isn't anyone's real name to begin with and 2> his sister doesn't go around calling people "fags" like Lavandeira does, she might actually be able to make the site more popular.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington: $12.5 million. Sure, TechCrunch's flagship tech business blog has "more than 20 senior writers, editor and business staff," but Arrington is "a controversial and polarizing figure," so he's worth half the company's total imaginary valuation of $50 million. (Pic: Robert Scoble)

The rest: MacRumors' Arnold Kim, a onetime doctor is estimated worth $4.2 million to his $21 million site; GigaOm's Om Malik accounts for $2.9 million of his tech blog network's $9.5 million value; Mashable's Pete Cashmore is estimated worth $1.25 million, or half of his tech blog's $2.5 million value; Business Insider's Henry Blodget $1.5 million or two-thirds of the total value of his financial blogging company; Markos Moulitsas (pictured) $1.7 million of political blog Daily Kos' $2 million made-up value. (Pic: Steve Rhodes)

Today's appearance, which involved a discussion of corporate executive "narcissism" and excess spending (see attached clip), should have been jarring for anyone familiar with Huffington's lifestyle and spending habits. The Brentwood, California-based internet mogul might drive a Prius and engage in environmental posturing, but that doesn't keep her from hitching rides on David Geffen's jet; hopping on a private plane with Ari Emanuel and Larry David for the New Hampshire primaries; or cruising around the ocean on Larry Ellison's enormous yacht (partly owned by Geffen).

Such gallivanting must feel utterly natural to Huffington, a former socialite who started HuffPo from her mansion following an eight-year marriage to wealthy oil scion Michael Huffington. Her spending apparently strikes Huffington as something utterly different from what those evil Wall Street types did.

But Huffington's no penny pincher in the corporate suite, either. Her profligate ways became an issue with HuffPo's board, an insider told us. Huffington denied that charge. But there's no question she throws lavish parties, including HuffPo's A-list inaugural ball at the Newseum in January. And with HuffPo's editorial headquarters in New York, she's constantly racking up travel expenses, including that time, notorious internally, when she sent an assistant across the country and back to fetch her passport.

Also, rather than just rent a Gotham apartment, Huffington became a frequent guest at the Mercer Hotel luxury boutique. And her travel preferences are said to be exactingly cushy: First class, aisle, bulkhead seat on a three-class plane only, fully refundable and non-stop. Preferably American or United. (Huffington, to be fair, sometimes relaxes these requirements for a convenient Southwest Airlines hop to San Francisco or Vegas. Southwest has only one class of seating.)

But that's apparently small time, as far as Huffington is concerned, not to mention a royal pain in the neck to her and the editors she has used as personal secretaries. After one infusion of fresh capital, Huffington was heard internally telling staff that everyone's lives would be greatly improved "once we get the jet."

It would seem that was one spending spree that was never approved, and for good reason: It's an absurd idea. Even assuming Huffington Post is on track to more than double last year's purported revenues of $9 million, as one anonymous insider claims, that's not jet money. (Huffington and her spokesman did not answer repeated inquiries on revenue.) At the absolute low end, the cost would start at $3 million, before you get to operating costs which for jet aircraft are typically in the thousands of dollars per hour. Fractional ownership jets also cost in the multiple thousands of dollars per hour to operate, in addition to an upfront fee starting at several hundred thousand dollars.

Not to mention the fuel guzzled by one of these babies each year cancels out the moderate environmental savings produced by a few fleets of Priuses.

To grasp how absurd such a purchase would be for Huffington at this stage of her corporate career, consider that News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch flew commercial after he'd already assembled a global newspaper empire and bought the 20th Century Fox movie studio and started the Fox television network. He only switched to a private plane, biographer Michael Wolff has written, after then-underling Barry Diller got one first.

And yet Huffington is lecturing America on corporate excess. Luckily for her, being a hypocrite has never really kept the internet publisher from making her political points forcefully — and often quite effectively. The only question is whether it will keep her from building a real business out of her publication.

(Jet pic: A bargain basement Eclipse 500. By Geoff Collins.)

The Hollywood Reporter passes on word that Huffington has joined forces with How I Met Your Mother executive producer Greg Malins to concoct a new ABC series about three newbie Congressional members trying to make their way in our nation's capital:

The 20th Century Fox TV-produced project centers on the friendship of three freshman members of Congress — two men and a woman — who live together in D.C.

"One is swept up in the movement of change and goes to D.C. to make a difference; one has been in politics for a long time; and one is a master of the media and sound bites," Malins said.

The project will draw inspiration from real-life Washington figures.

Apparently Malins and company think DC is the hottest ticket in Hollywood. You know, because Barack Obama has made the District cool again. But has it really?

A number of DC-based shows tried — and failed — to make it to the small screen this season, yet television big-wigs axed the ideas. And, honestly, we can't blame them. Our nation has become hyper-politicized and the very thought of a fictionalized account of our collective national struggle seems, at best, a lame attempt at zeitgeist-related desperation.

Motivational huckster Tony Robbins made a characteristically tasteful video about 9/11. His shorts did most of the talking, on this solemn anniversary.

Oprah called for a "tweet of silence" to commemorate 9/11. Wait, what? Is that even possible? Oh, it must be when you don't tweet for weeks on end, like Oprah.

Sweaty actress Lauren Conrad is looking for somewhere to shower. Application line forms to the left. SINGLE FILE!

Forbes' Bruce Upbin took a fun swipe at the Economist's bean counters.

Arianna Huffington is visiting Twitter. Will the internet publisher bring her new tech editor?

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Arianna Huffington is famously aggressive about plucking bloggers from her personal life; in 48 hours last year she invited "someone at a book signing... a fifteen-year-old lecture attendee; a bookstore owner; the Asperger's-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j.; a woman... who was trying to stop insecticide spraying."

But the internet mogul doesn't pay the vast majority of her contributors; they must make the work pay elsewhere, and this is where HuffPo gets itself into trouble. Kim Evans, who wrote about treating swine flu with enemas, just happens to be the flacking author of a book called Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse. New York City's comptroller, William Thompson Jr., has used his HuffPo blog as an extension of his mayoral campaign. And so on

More alarming is the site's relationship with Russell Bishop, like Arianna Huffington a disciple of the culty Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness and its worshipped leader John-Roger. Bishop co-founded the employee development firm Insight Seminars with John-Roger; Insight shares a "Spiritual Director," John Morton, with the religious group and at one point its headquarters was monitored by John-Roger via widespread listening devices, according to a Los Angeles Times exposé.

Arianna Huffington has forced her staff to attend Insight retreats, according to insiders.

She's also installed Bishop as HuffPo "Senior Editor at Large." Bishop's role, an insider tells us, is mainly to recruit bloggers to the Living section and shape its tone; it's this same Living section that contains the pseudo-medical articles Salon's doctor, and a great many science bloggers, complain about. This, perhaps, explains why the section has so many MSIA true believers.

Indeed, Huffington's relationship with MSIA — she is an ordained "Minister of Light" in the group and loads her iPod with guided MSIA meditations — might also give a clue as to why her website has such a heavy focus on alternative treatments.

According to Life 102, a memoir by disaffected ex MSIA member Peter McWilliams, John-Roger discouraged traditional medical treatments, often "healing" people with his own spiritual powers. After McWilliams got sick in Africa, apparently from parasites, the guru advised him to go to a self-described "nutritionist" rather than a real doctor. When he did visit a real doctor, John-Roger admonished him:

When I told J-R about my rapid healing thanks to Western medicine... he told me it was just "a coincidence" that I started getting better within twenty-four hours of taking the prescription. "The natural way was working, and you would have gotten better at exactly the same time because what cured you was the natural medication. The prescription drug just polluted your system, now I've got to work on taking all the toxicity of it out of your system."

Now, thanks to the Huffington Post, we can all question Western medicine in this manner.

(Pic: Huffington and John-Roger at a 2004 book party.)

Arianna Huffington crowed after the 2008 presidential election that her website is "more participatory" than publications that practice journalism "the old way." But she's a favor-trading traditionalist when it comes to distributing money: Even the best contributing bloggers are unpaid, while paying gigs tend to go to VIPs.

Some have earned their status. Others were born into it.

Which isn't to say the well born are necessarily unqualified for their jobs: HuffPo is notoriously hard to work for, with famously high turnover; couple this with the site's national expansion and it's easy to see why HuffPo is hungry for young talent. But aren't there, like, some laid off journalists out there, with actual experience?

Here are some of the well-connected VIP spawn Arianna's taken on:

Ethan Axelrod

Ethan Axelrod is the son of Barack Obama's longtime adviser David Axelrod. The 22-year-old has written and edited for his student newspaper at Colorado College, according to the Washington Post, and apparently has no other professional journalism experience. He will edit HuffPo's Denver edition.

Mediaite quotes insiders saying he's modest about his killer genes:

"He's a very nice, unassuming guy," one staffer told Mediaite. "He's smart, obviously – he comes from good stock."

Funny that the Post's Howard Kurtz didn't mention his newspaper's own family connection to the HuffPo (see next).

(Photo via Axelrod's Facebook profile)

Nicholas Graham

Nicholas Graham is part of the same Graham family that owns the Washington Post. Formerly an Associate News Editor at HuffPo, Graham appears to have recently become Associate Video Editor. One insider tells us his predecessor, Patrick Waldo, was well liked inside of the company but was recently pushed out. (Pic via NCAA YouTube)

Elyssa Spitzer

It's hard to begrudge Elyssa Spitzer her HuffPo internship for at least two reasons. One, as the daughter of disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, she's been through a lot of family trauma in the past year and a half. Two, we're not even sure if her internship is paid. (Pic via Cityfile)

Liz Hanks

In 2007 and 2008, Liz Hanks worked as Associate Living Editor at HuffPo. We've heard actor Tom Hanks' daughter had two other jobs, as a news and blog editor, and that Arianna Huffington eagerly publicized her name and presence after she joined the staff (to a degree some on staff found unseemly).

We imagine working in the living section was scary: It was home to a wide array of true believers from Arianna Huffington's culty religious group, the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness. Hanks' supervisor, Anya Strzemien, was, according to insiders, forced by Huffington to attend a seminar run by a group closely tied to MSIA.Despite the hubub around her, Hanks seems to have been generally well regarded within HuffPo for keeping a level head.

Matthew Palevsky

Matthew Palevsky is Arianna Huffington's godson. His father Max was a billionaire computer entrepreneur. Palevsky was in January appointed to oversee HuffPo's OffTheBus citizen journalism initiative. He hardly seemed qualified:

The effort was a crown jewel, breaking two major scoops during the 2008 presidential campaign. It was previously headed by big guns: a Howard Dean and John Kerry organizer who formed a Web volunteering institute at Harvard Law, and a Nation editor and longtime magazine writer who teaches journalism at USC. They were of no relation to Huffington; one was later hired by Pro Publica.

Katherine Zaleski

Katherine Zaleski's father is said to be close friends with Ken Lerer, Huffington Post's co-founder. Further, we're told she has her own apartment in the El Dorado luxury co-op at 300 Central Park West; her dad is said to live in a separate penthouse of his own and Lerer a few floors down.

For four years, Zaleski controlled the coveted front page of the Huffington Post — as much as anyone besides Arianna does — but later moved into a special projects role. She took over the New York section after Dan Collins abruptly quit (Huffington later claimed he was always supposed to leave the job just after launch, but that's not what she told us just before launch).

Vargas covered "the marriage" of the Internet and politics at the Washington Post, but that doesn't mean he's a above some straying. He's going to oversee the Huffington Post's new tech section in the fall, reports the New York Times' Brian Stelter.

We can only imagine Arianna was breathy as she described for Stelter her "regular" emails with Vargas since the election. They apparently involved harnessing people for deep engagement, and were quite memorable:

I love his passion for communicating how technology impacts our lives, and exploring the many ways the Internet can be harnessed to reach new readers and engage existing ones more deeply - something we've been working on at HuffPost since the beginning.

Two weeks ago, Huffington hired newly-discharged Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin; a month and a half before that HuffPo poached WaPo investigations editor Lawrence Roberts. HuffPo's editors also include longtime WaPo reporter Thomas Edsall and Nicholas Graham, of the family that owns the DC newspaper.

The big impact of the Vargas hire, of course, is that it means yet another awkward goodbye party appearance for WaPo columnist Dana Millbank, who thinks HuffPo's DC bureau is basically a bag of craven dicks. Or rather was a bag of craven dicks. Use that at the party, Dana. Was.

(Pic via Philippines Embassy)

Annemarie Dooling, who was collected enough to tweet a bank robbery, found her nerves were no match for the press.

Eve Fairbanks of the New Republic found plagiarism in the darnedest place.

Penelope Trunk, the advice columnist, told the shameful truth about her little hometown.

MSNBC Web maven Will Femia could hardly believe his ears.

Arianna Huffington finally got around to linking that column on the power of rapid communication.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

After calling outsourcing "unpatriotic, un-American" on her website, Huffington is... outsourcing. Here's an item from her Huffington Post's current job listings:

After raising $15 million in funding in the fall, one would think Huffington could afford to hire some American programmers, especially with unemployment nearing 10 percent. After all, paying the technical guys might help deflect the criticism that HuffPo exploits its largely unpaid writers. As for the hypocrisy, we assume Huffington, a notorious political flip-flopper, will simply say her views have evolved. Or maybe she'll blame a flunkie.

(Pic: Roo Reynolds)

At least Froomkin will be around other ex-Posties. He joins former WaPo investigations editor Lawrence Roberts, who joined HuffPo's new investigative fund in May, and Thomas Edsall, the longtime WaPo reporter who joined as titular political editor two years ago. Then there's Nicholas Graham, a Huffington Post associate editor and member of the family that owns the Washington Post.

Froomkin, who many supporters believe was ousted over the aggressive tenor of his reporting, will head HuffPo's Washington bureau, overseeing four reporters and an assistant editor. He'll thus learn first hand how deeply involved Arianna Huffington is the publication of her website, from arranging the front page to spiking articles for running afoul of her preferred political paradigm. Get ready for some fun, long phone calls, Dan. Try not to break any desks or strain your vocal chords.

(Pic by yksin)

HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer tells the New York Observer that the new CEO, Eric Hippeau of HuffPo investor Softbank, "thinks this isn't the time to be profitable-it's the time to invest." Investment is inevitable, since HuffPo has some $25 million in fresh venture capital reserved strictly for growth (as Huffington told us Monday, "The $25 million we raised from Oak has not been touched. It's available for our next round of expansion").

But why not finally turn profitable? In March 2008, more than a year ago, the New Yorker said the publication was "poised to break even." Since then, money has poured in; HuffPo brags it has doubled revenue over the past year and a half. Profitability, then, must have been restrained by expenditures, reportedly a longtime problem at HuffPo. There's been talking of trimming costs.

And yet Hippeau tells the Observer he's "not here to fix" the publication, "I'm here to grow it... we'll have deep partnerships with major players, which goes beyond content-sharing." Maybe one of these "deep partnerships" will take the problem of making money as an independent business off HuffPo's plate for good.

(Pic via Blip.tv's new interview with Hippeau)

Costs alone don't explain the leadership change. Incoming CEO Eric Hippeau, of Softbank, replaces Betsy Morgan, deemed less capable of growing the Web publication. Morgan was largely ineffectual, one former staffer said. "Generally ignored," said another insider, excepting those occasions when one was across from the former CBSNews.com manager at one of her long lunches.

Huffington, for the record, told us she "loved working with Betsy." That's to be expected, if you believe former staff: Morgan didn't fight Huffington on spending, we're told, but others on the business side have been pushing back for some time, on expenses ranging from new assistants to new computers to travel, accommodations and miscellaneous hiring

The board of directors, nominally in charge of business operations, clashed regularly with Huffington, a HuffPo insider said. "There were moments when the board would say, 'Absolutely no more spending and hiring,' and that would be violated.'"

Arianna is always hiring tons of people — five people to do the job one expert could do.

It doesn't help matters that Huffington has repeatedly used employees for personal errands, according to former staff. Throw in the recession and the earmark on HuffPo's recent $25 million capital round — it's reserved for expansion — and it's easy to see why costs might be an ongoing conern.

Huffington, though, insists there's been no problem whatsoever. "There has never been any concern about expenses," she wrote in an email.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.As if to underline the point, she confirms a bit of news about HuffPo's ongoing expansion into local markets: Helming the Huffington Post's forthcoming New York edition is Dan Collins, the hard news producer of CBSNews.com and husband of New York Times columnist Gail Collins.

The local HuffPo launches at the end of this month with help from Katherine Zaleski, 27, who for the past four years has been gatekeeper over the HuffPo's front page. Zaleski, whose father is said to be good friends with HuffPo founder Ken Lerer, has become Senior Editor for Special Projects.

Morgan joined HuffPo in October 2007 after working as general manager at CBSNews.com. As CEO, she served on the HuffPo board along with Hippeau, Arianna Huffington, co-founder Kenneth Lerer and Fred Harman of Oak Investment Partners, which in December put $25 million into the internet publication.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.That deal converted HuffPo's election buzz and traffic into dollars, signaling that the publication was entering the media big leagues. Another key development was an investigative reporting grant, accompanied by the influx of veteran editors from other publications, including one from the Washington Post.

It's been unclear whether the recent growth was compatible with founder Huffington's often volatile and always idiosyncratic management style; today's turnover could be a sign that HuffPo's investors demanded closer supervision — or, less climactically, simply wanted Morgan out.

UPDATE: HuffPo confirms, in a statement that pointedly notes, "The Huffington Post co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer made the announcement" of Morgan's departure and not, say, Softbank. Morgan, meanwhile, pointedly notes that she's leaving with some shares of the company.

Huffington's quote:

Having worked closely with [Hippeau] for the last three years, I know firsthand what an invaluable asset he has been in our expansion. And now, given his impressive background in the industry and his intimate knowledge of HuffPost, Eric is uniquely able to hit the ground running as the company takes its expansion to the next level.

Hippeau was CEO of tech publisher Ziff Davis from 1989-2000 and serves on the board of Yahoo. At Softbank, he's a managing partner.

(Pic: Top via PaidContent, bottom via TechCrunch)

She lists off some recent stories from the site's "Entertainment" section to give you some flavor.

This one-sided liberal hate site has one fatal weakness-boobs. Let's check out some recent stories from the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

• Here are some photos of Natalie Portman's nipple.
• Here are some photos of Beyonce's nipple, complete with HuffPo-provided "NSFW zoom."
• Here are some photos of Pamela Anderson's nipple (hardly news, but a boob's a boob).
• Here is an entire page devoted to recently naked women (and Barack Obama).
• Here is a collection of zoomed-in photos of 23 celebrities' breasts, made into a fun game called "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants?"

Pretty standard entertainment-section blog fare here-though HuffPo does go above and beyond with the "NSFW zoom." You don't see a Beyonce nipple that close just anywhere.

While Amanda's examples aren't all from the same day, it's a rare day that some coverage of a salacious story about an attractive woman doesn't make HuffPo's "Top Stories." An example, from today:
So, there's an auto-erotic asphyxiation story and Heather Graham opining about her love of Tantric sex. Gotcha. And on the day after Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity that she'd like to tell Obama voters, "I told you so," about America becoming a Socialist nation yet not being permitted to speak to a Republican audience, their front page story about her isn't atypical.
Not atypical, if one is running a gossip site.

Amanda acknowledges that the nip slip/hot chick page views are part of Huffington Post's business model, regardless of its politics. But she notes that the entertainment coverage often does have a liberal bent — it's just not often sensitive to women.

But look past the nipples, if you can, and you will find a clear liberal bent in HuffPo's non-boob Entertainment stories. Yesterday, the top three links on the Entertainment page could be considered GLBT interest stories: "Adam Lambert Confirms Rolling Stone To Address His Sexuality"; "WATCH: Neil Patrick Harris' FANTASTIC Tonys Closing Song"; "Gordon Ramsay Shocks Audience With ‘Lesbian' Rant About Journalist." Also on the page yesterday was blogger Jackson Katz's post directly addressing the objectification of women in entertainment, titled "Eminem, Misogyny and the Sounds of Silence."

Notably, most of HuffPo's bloggers aren't paid — and their coverage isn't highlighted with splash page retail space in the same way that the stories about sex and nipples are.

And while some people might call looking at nip slips a little mindless fun to drive in the viewers HuffPo desires to influence politically, Amanda isn't having it.

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there's no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman's body part is a priority. Real women's issues, not so much.

Somehow, "Come for the nipples, stay for the feminism" doesn't seem quite right to us either.

Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment [Washington City Paper]

HuffPo just shared some key details with Irin Carmon of Women's Wear Daily:

This year, The Huffington Post will have 22 interns... a number that approaches that of paid staff (about 35 in editorial, 60 on staff overall.) That includes one intern who paid at least $13,000 in a charity auction for the privilege.

...Half of these interns are being paid, a spokesman for the Huffington Post confirmed. The spokesman declined to say how much, calling the question "silliness."

It's not clear how publisher Arianna Huffington decides who to pay and who not to pay (we've asked and not yet heard back). But it's worth noting that some Huffington underlings have higher profiles than others. This year's staff, for example, includes former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's daughter (per WWD), as well as editor Nicholas Graham, of the family that owns the Washington Post.

Liz Hanks, daughter of actor Tom Hanks, has also worked for the site. And Huffington this year handed an important management role to her godson, heir to a computer fortune worth billions of dollars.

So if you're trying to get paid at Huffington's innovative new media game-changer, it might help to be born to the right parents, if you can pull that off.

Ad Age's Simon Dumenco is shuddering:

Really, the school — which exists to train journalists — should know better than to honor a woman who thinks journalists should work for free!

...Now please excuse me as I crawl under my desk and curl into the fetal position.

It's true that there's something awkward about Huffington's award; we said so last month.

But if it's Huffington's volunteer model that makes you feel queasy, it's time to get over the feeling, because the internet mogul is hardly alone in exploiting unpaid contributors. Just this morning, the New York Times' David Carr wrote about a group of laid-off New Jersey journalists whose independent website, it turns out, earns enough to pay them all of $42 per week.

And the Times itself is experimenting with citizen journalism, on its Brooklyn blog "The Local." In fact, newspapers across the country have been tinkering with unpaid online contributors for years now.

If you're going to cower in fear of Huffington, it should be because you have to work for her. It's far too late to fret over her successful — and widely copied — business model.