media
We were impressed last month
when it was rumored that the
Huffington Post may have raised $15 million in new investment, a big accomplishment for a media company at a time when the media economy is in the trash. Well, those rumors turned out to be false. Actually, HuffPo
has raised $25 million from a venture capital firm. Amazing. So what will they do with all this cash?
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media
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:
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saturday night live
This is Michaela Watkins, and she's apparently the newest addition to the cast of
Saturday Night Live, the ancient sketch comedy show that is relevant again because a) you can watch just the funny bits online and b) there was apparently a presidential election this year. (Ok fine and c) they have a good cast and it seems less terrible in its current incarnation than it did the last time everyone talked about how they were watching it again.) In the attached clip, Watkins is doing her audition bit: a pretty great impression of noted blog-runner and grudge-holder and Internet Doyenne
Arianna Huffington! Hooray, making fun of Arianna Huffington will soon hit the mainstream! Click to watch.
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the internet
It is easy to be so taken by
Arianna Huffington's charm and personal history that one loses sight of the big picture.
Just ask the New Yorker's Lauren Collins, whose profile of the
Huffington Post publisher had too much on Huffington's yoga and sleeping habits and not enough about how she operates her business. The
Times, too, seems to be overly concerned with personal narratives this morning,
educating readers at length about how Huffington and
royalist competitor Tina Brown went to fancy London parties together in the 1970s and both dated older men, so they're friendly rather than cutthroat competitors. Whatever. The real question: How is either of these money-losing publishers going to attract advertising?
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daily beast
Internet publishers
Arianna Huffington and
Tina Brown may both be foreign transplants to the U.S., but there's little question which of the two fifty-somethings has more fully assimilated her site to the democratic rough-and-tumble of American Web culture. It was Huffington who offered blogs to five virtual strangers over the course of two days, as
documented in the
New Yorker earlier this month, including "the Asperger’s-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j." and "a woman, dressed exclusively in green, who was trying to stop insecticide spraying." Brown, in contrast, has lent her
Daily Beast a distinctly royalist feel, as one might expect from a
Commander of the British Empire. And the former
New Yorker editor played the snob angle for all it was worth in a
lengthy interview with
Portfolio's
Lloyd Grove:
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Listicle
The "voting" bit of the endless 2008 election has not yet happened, but honestly the winner of
that particular contest is of little concern to anyone but plumbers and unemployed auto workers and ladies who want their precious "abortions." No, from here, two weeks out from Election Day, with Obama suspending his campaign and John McCain abandoning swing states, we can already plainly see who's really come out on top over these last couple months. Media whores! And, you know, media people who we actually like and wouldn't therefore call "whores." After the jump, the five
real winners of the 2008 elections.
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the huffington posts
Arianna Huffington for many years sought to downplay the extent of her involvement in the Movement For Spiritual Inner Awareness, a cult ex-members described as sexually and financially exploitive in a series of
Los Angeles Times exposés in the 1980s and 1990s. During her then-husband's 1994 U.S. Senate run, the Greek-born socialite claimed movement founder John-Roger (pictured with her at a 2004 book party, left) was a mere friend, and pictures of him holding her daughter were ordered withheld from the group's newspaper, the editor later said. But the
Huffington Post editor-in-chief is an ordained "Minister Of Light" in the group and once described John-Roger to
Interview as her "way-shower." She relaxed a bit in the
New Yorker's Oct. 13
profile , admitting she had been too "defensive" about John-Roger, and allowing writer Lauren Collins to listen to a guided MSIA meditation stored on Huffington's iPod. But she wasn't entirely forthcoming. What about the role she has fashioned for her cult in
HuffPo staff development?
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