• media

    Huffington Post Raises Incredible Amount Of Money

    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? More »
  • snl

    Mocking Arianna The Way She Deserves To Be Mocked

    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. More »
  • media

    Reports: HuffPo Maybe, Coulda Raised $15 Million

    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: More »
  • media

    Arianna Huffington Will Fund More Journalism, Somehow

    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. More »
  • videuhoh

    Arianna Declares 'Biggest Wiener' Of Election Season

    Arianna Huffington's thick Greek accent is usually a social asset. It adds spice to a televised panel discussion, and on the party circuit encourages a conversation partner to lean in intimately to understand the former socialite's words. But give the internet publisher her own hourlong TV show, as with her guest-hosting stint tonight on the Rachel Maddow Show, and the accent becomes a liability, like a single seasoning taking over a dish. "You can't understand a word she says and she even makes my cat get irritated," one tipster wrote 20 minutes into the program. More »
  • saturday night live

    Meet 'SNL's' New Arianna Huffington

    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. More »
  • the internet

    Internet Doyennes Both Love Cash Bonfires

    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? More »
  • daily beast

    Tina Brown Says Arianna Will Publish Anything

    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: More »
  • Listicle

    Five Real 2008 Election Winners

    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. More »
  • the huffington posts

    Arianna's Mandatory Cult Meetings

    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? More »