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.)

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).

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.

Matthew Palevsky, who graduated from Brown University last year, will have help running Off the Bus. Gabriel Beltrone, an NYU senior and former Off The Bus intern, will be his right-hand man. Palevsky's mother Jodie Evans, co-founder of left-wing protest group Code Pink, has long guided her son's activism and will no doubt be happy to lend advice. His billionaire father, the computer entrepreneur Max Palevsky, can provide other means of support.

Then there's his own background, such as it is. In college, Palevsky worked on the urgent issue of drug reform. Since then, he's been a bureau chief at the Real News Network, a nonprofit TV news organization bankrolled by his father, where Palevsky interviewed such luminaries as... Arianna Huffington.

He faces a daunting challenge. Among Off The Bus' more prominent stories were "Bittergate," in which HuffPo's Mayhill Fowler recorded Barack Obama's comments about "bitter" working-class voters "clinging to guns or religion," and a recording of Bill Clinton slamming Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum as a "slimy... scumbag." OTB garnered 12,000 volunteer participants, Arianna Huffington wrote in November, a database of free labor many cash-strapped news organizations would kill for.

But the effort lost momentum. It's been more than two months since Off The Bus updated regularly, and nearly as long since the last post. And young Palevsky has big shoes to fill. He takes over from Amanda Michel, who at Harvard Law formed an institute to organize volunteers over the Web, as she had done for John Kerry and Howard Dean; and Marc Cooper, a Nation editor and longtime magazine writer now teaching journalism at USC. Both were profiled in the Times and thanked by Huffington, but neither appears to be any longer active with HuffPo.

We poked around about Palevsky and Off The Bus after receiving a copy of this email, sent by Huffington to her entire staff yesterday:

Palevsky's name sounded familiar; the questions that could not be answered by Google were easily filled in by the HuffPo grapevine.

It is not lost on that network that Huffington has largely surrounded herself with unseasoned, twentysomething lieutenants who are more easily controlled by the notorious micromanager. The HuffPo front page is controlled by tortured twentysomething screamer Colin Sterling and Katharine Zaleski, like Palevsky the well-kept child of a wealthy family. That Palevsky and Beltrone will shepherd Huffington Post's single greatest strategic asset despite their total lack of management experience is thus not surprising. But it should give the eccentric, breakdown-prone publisher's investors pause, to say nothing of boosters of citizen journalism:

Huffington bragged after the election that the open, volunteer model of Off The Bus was not duplicated "in the national section of any major newspaper covering the 2008 election." The papers practiced journalism "the old way." In the end, though, Huffington was more interested in clinging to the traditional system of nepotism and cloistered favor-trading than in building a new, more democratic media infrastructure.

Prior Huffington coverage: The Huffington Posts

Among the tips that poured in after we started really asking questions about Huffington last month, in the wake of a New Yorker profile of the onetime socialite, was one claiming Huffington "had a breakdown (like bat-shit crazy person breakdown) in front of one male staffer who was working on Right Is Wrong," Huffington's recent political book. Another ex-HuffPo staffer subsequently confirmed the account to us, saying the staffer in question was shaken up, and pointing to Republican strategist Ed Rollins' book for more examples (it's on order!).

This second staffer said many HuffPo staffers are, at some point in their employey, witness to such breakdowns: Yelling, followed by an enraged denunciation of the person's skills and/or value as an employee and/or as a person, then tears and, perhaps, a later attempt at reconciliation.

Several other ex-HuffPo insiders said that general description of the quality and quantity of Huffington's rages met with their experience. "The breakdowns entail screaming and crying for a drawn out period of time," one said. Another:

Breakdowns are frequent... Although it's not so much crying as this wail-y, near-crying, cracked voice she employs when she is quite literally shaking with rage. When you hear that voice you know you're well past the point of no return.

Some breakdowns arose during Huffington's work on books, serious and stressful extracurricular projects that in many ways resembl, say, hosting a top-rated MSNBC show for a night. From that perspective, staffers have good reason to walk on eggshells (when not running personal errands) in the runnup to the Rachel Maddow Show gig tonight. It can't help Huffington's mood that she'll be working for a network where she was once reportedly banned for attacking Meet The Press host Tim Russert, the longtime Huffington enemy who has only grown more revered since his passing.

On the other hand, multiple former staff said Huffington's fits were often set off by trivial matters, disproportionately including minor issues with cars and drivers.

Take the subway, Arianna, for everyone's sake! Your show sounds fun.

If anyone knows how Huffington is doing, today, this week or at some point in her long past, we'd love to hear from you.

Prior Huffington coverage: The Huffington Posts

Late last year, former staffers say, Huffington directed two Huffington Post employees to attend an Insight Seminar in Westlake Village, California. Though technically distinct from MSIA, Insight shares a founder, John-Roger, and a "Spiritual Director," John Morton (right) with the group. This sharing of staff goes back at least 20 years, when the LA Times reported Insight was rife with MSIA "volunteers" and obtained emails showing John-Roger was calling the shots. A former top-ranked church minister told the paper Insight was used to draw new recruits into MSIA.

One of the staff members made to attend the event was HuffPo's New York-based Living section editor, Anya Strzemien (left), according to two insiders. Strzemien did not respond to an email seeking comment, but Huffington Post is said to have paid the bill for her flight and multi-day stay in California, and by all accounts the trip occurred at Arianna's behest. Said one tipster: "It was kind of a joke in the office, like 'is she going to be brainwashed by the creepy cult.'" It is not clear if Strzemien was attending for personal development, to "cover" the event for HuffPo or both.

The other staffer was apparently an unnamed Los Angeles-based scheduler struggling to serve Huffington, an erratic and sometimes brutal presence over staffers who work out of her Brentwood mansion. It was made clear to this person, one source said, that attending the conference was necessary to keep her job. Huffington asked the staffer to think about how important her job was to her, then suggested the seminar as a way to refocus — a neat way of making the event mandatory without being explicit and perhaps running afoul of laws governing religion in the workplace, the source said. After struggling with the decision for a week, and supposedly making a fruitless plea to HR in New York, the scheduler ended up attending, only to leave the company a month or two later.

Huffington's commitment to MSIA may well go beyond seminars for her staff. One tipster said that while Huffington is reported, including by the New Yorker, to give to 10 percent of her income to charity each year, that money flows as a tithe to MSIA, and/or to charities closely linked to the cult. That would be in keeping with church principles, as described in a lengthy 1988 LA Times article:

Tithing, or giving a percentage of one's monthly income to MSIA, is also recommended. Because of its tax-exempt status as a church, MSIA is not required to make public its financial records, but by all indications people contribute money freely — in some cases in large lump sums.

One devotee happily told the newspaper about handing over a check to the group for $500,000, without even knowing how it would be used.

Why would Huffington tie her enterprise, which depends for its continued success on access to celebrity contributors and other influential people, to a controversial organization like MSIA? Perhaps because making the Huffington Post a faithful reflection of her own personality has worked so well thus far. Despite its turnover problem, the website has posted truly astounding traffic growth just in the past few months, to 262 million pageviews per month, as the election draws near. And as the New Yorker noted, HuffPo has become an influential hub for liberal political discourse, drawing op-eds from the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. More importantly, its reporting has figured prominently in the election, particularly Mayhill Fowler's scoop on Barack Obama's comments about "bitter" small-town Americans and Sam Stein's scoops, including on John McCain's fake campaign suspension.

But it is all but impossible to read the LA Times' three exhaustive articles on MSIA, dating to 1988 and 1994, without coming to the conclusion that the movement is, in fact, a scary cult, and among the last organizations Huffington should be calling on to prepare HuffPo to keep growing as the economy, and soon politics, cools down.

John-Roger is depicted as a paranoid leader who secretly wires each room in Insight headquarters with a microphone connected to his office, who taps the phones, and who warns that his critics "had been infected by a powerful and contagious negative force known as the Red Monk," a spirit of whom members were terrified. He removed "negative entities" in a popular "exorcism-like" ceremony known as the "Super II's," organized hours-long "Prana Awareness Trainings" involving "repeatedly answering a simple question," and organized followers into a complex hierarchy, including a Melchizedek Priesthood and an inner, elite circle of attractive young male ministers known as "the Guys."

The LA Times said one of these favored sons was among at least three close John-Rogers associates who said they had sex with him "as an important spiritual favor:"

In July of 1977, John-Roger put [Victor] Toso on staff, and he joined the rarefied ranks of "the guys." But things didn't go smoothly. "He kept telling me I didn't have what it took to be on staff," Toso said. Finally John-Roger told him that he would have to move from the hillside estate to the movement's Purple Rose Ashram of the New Age in downtown Los Angeles, he said.

Toso says that he dropped to his knees and sobbed, begging John-Roger to tell him how he might become a better servant of the Traveler.

"It dawned on me what I had to do," he said.

To stay on staff, Toso said he knew he would have to engage in sexual relations with John-Roger. "I decided to make the Faustian pact," he said. "And, indeed, I was admitted into the brotherhood."But the pact didn't sit well with Toso, even as he found his life with the Traveler vastly improved. And one day "I walked in on another staff member having sex with J-R. I had been naive enough to believe I was the only one," Toso said.

In last year's interview, John-Roger denied he had sexual relations with Toso or any other staff member.

Toso said he was later "defrocked" in front of other church members and stripped of his wallet, credit cards, watch, ring and airline tickets, and had to write a "dishonest" letter to get them back. Other former members, named in the series, testify to brainwashing and other forms of manipulation. "My God, I was manipulated and used," former MSIA newspaper editor Victoria Marine told the newspaper.

In the articles, John-Roger denies having sex with or brainwashing his followers.

Whatever his flaws, and whatever it is that has drawn so many to look to him almost as a messiah over the past 38 years, a "Mystic Traveler" to be physically envisioned while chanting and to be paid for "polarity balancings," "John-" Roger Hinkins shares with Arianna Huffington a reputation for having two faces, one of seductive, overpowering charm and the other for a nasty temper.

Wrote the LA Times:

Two [former staffers], Toso and Wesley Whitmore, recall thinking that in contrast to his public behavior, John-Roger in private was often angry, vindictive and bizarre, occasionally shouting that he was under attack from negative forces. But their devotion to John-Roger kept them from addressing these issues, they said.

And so it is with Arianna and her badly battered staff. She could hardly have picked a more appropriate guru.

On the strength of its left-leaning political coverage, the Huffington Post has become a breakaway success, with more traffic than Drudge and more inbound links than TechCrunch. But advertisers hate politics, Arianna's favored and strongest topic, so the site is trying to diversify. As it does so, Arianna's skills — and flaws — as a manager will become more visible and more important.

Why does Huffington push herself to the point where, as both the recent New Yorker profile and those who have worked with her made clear, she has few, if any, serious friends outside of HuffPo? Why is she focused on her project to the point where associates wonder when she could find time for an affair with Cory Booker, as was bizarrely (in their eyes) rumored?

There is speculation as to the reasons. Bipolar disorder, perhaps? (There is no known evidence, only the guesses of laymen.)

Or maybe Huffington's priorities come from the teachings of the cultish Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, with which she has long been involved, for which her frequent contributor Russell Bishop launched a lucrative series of corporate "Insight" courses, and to which her live-in sister Agapi is said to be an especially fervent devotee?

Or perhaps Huffington is driven simply by ego. Within her publication it is understood, after all, that videos of her own media appearances are to be posted posthaste, top priority.

The cost of Huffington's poorly bounded ambitions are not born by her alone but also by her beleaguered staff, including aspiring journalists who until recently were hired, some claim, with no knowledge whatsoever they would take on some of the duties of administrative assistants or household servants. Duties like:

• taking heavily accented email dictation,
• arranging haircuts or troubleshooting BlackBerrys for Huffington's daughters,
• fetching lunch or coffee,
• or writing talking points for Huffington's television appearances.

There are far worse jobs, to be sure, than editor and part-time admin for one of the top sites on the internet. But a great many of those who have worked with Huffington seem bruised, and compelled to talk about — vent about — their experiences and those of others. (And yes we, of all sites, should know this sort of thing when we see it.)

From their stories one can piece together a kind of coterie of miserable self-sacrifice. Here are three members of that dubious clique:

The Passport Mule

Huffington is known for forgetfully leaving essential gear behind as she jots around the world, including, most frequently, between her Brentwood home office, HuffPo's New York office and the Mercer Hotel in SoHo. The most infamous example of this, multiple sources said, occurred when Huffington, or more likely a carelessly-instructed housekeeper, neglected to pack Arianna's passport for a trip from Brentwood. Once in New York on the first leg, Huffington realized she needed the passport to enter Canada for a fast-approaching trip to Toronto.

There was no time. An unnamed female HuffPo staffer was dispatched in the wee hours on a flight to New York. She delivered the passport to the Mercer and was promptly placed on a return flight to Los Angeles, another 18-hour day in the service of Arianna's Vortex. She may or may not have been treated to lunch in between!

Young Colin Sterling

Sterling became blog editor at the Huffington Post, and a top conduit between Arianna and the New York office, following the departure of two seasoned journalists, BBC's Elinor Shields and Rolling Stone's Frank Wilkinson, who did not fit into the publishing culture Huffington had created. Maybe Huffington couldn't let go of the site and provide them sufficient autonomy, or maybe they just couldn't mesh with Web publishing, it's not clear. (They each lasted at most a year.)

Today in his mid-20s, Sterling earned Huffington's trust as a researcher for her out West. By all accounts, his new job, with crushing demands from the very top, has taxed him. Called upon to, say, cram together TV talking points on less than half an hour's notice while riding herd over a massive, oddball stable of blog contributors, most of whom will be relegated to vertical sections far from the coveted front page, Sterling has been known to pound his desk with his fists and yell curses (a simple "Fuck!" being a favorite) immediately after hanging up on a call from Arianna, an act guaranteed to be noticed in HuffPo's open-plan 15-person Gotham newsroom.

Sterling is also, at times, short tempered with those underneath him: The public yelling and cursing are not directed only at the Gods in the wake of Arianna's calls, it seems. His "nasty" temper has made enemies, one person said, and contributed to a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere during the three or four weeks of each month Huffington is not in New York. Other observers are much more sympathetic, but still concede his personality seems to have bent sharply to fit that of his loved and hated boss.

In fairness, it should be noted that Huffington is said to have her own short temper. Though no one has been able to confirm that she called one editor a "retard" before he quit in protest, as we reported in our last HuffPo story, none doubted she would have said it, and some insiders said it would be in keeping with other nasty slights — calling people "fucking" liars, incompetents and worse.

Thanks to Arianna's manic work schedule, hours never quite end at HuffPo for anyone on staff, by all accounts. Fairly or not, Sterling seems to have become a bit of a poster child for the ill effects of that phenomenon.

Roy Sekoff

This is the man who, everyone seems to agree, writes Arianna's blog posts, the ones she pledged would "never" be ghost written. The process will be familiar to anyone who has similarly ghosted a column for an EIC: Huffington briefly sketches an idea, Sekoff (or perhaps, on occasion, another editor) researches it and puts it to words, and Huffington does a quick check prior to publication.

Sekoff also happens to be HuffPo's top, founding editor and Huffington's right-hand man, based in Los Angeles. A family man in his late 40s, he is described as not only older but more loyal than Huffington's other editors, many of whom are in their 20s. Thus eyebrows were arched when he gave this quote to the New Yorker, implying that Huffington is often unfamiliar with the topics she is called upon to discuss on television:

I’ve literally seen her stand somewhere, look at a piece of research, and then—boom!—go on TV and, word for word, nail the three most important points and leave out everything else.

One wonders how often the research in question came from Sekoff himself, and if his quote to the New Yorker wasn't a bit of subconscious revenge on Arianna for taking credit for so much of his own work.

If anyone has more information from inside the Huffington Post, for example on the clubby process of front-page story selection, or on the parade of editors through New York, we'd love to hear from you. And we're not even sure we could stop you guys from writing in at this point if we wanted to.

The stories about Huffington's difficult temperament as a manager seem to have evolved into lore, and likely some of the anecdotes that have circulated among her burned detractors are apocryphal. And yet at least some appear to go beyond mere myth, unsurprising for a competitive, multitasking mogul like Huffington, who the New Yorker compared to a typical "highpowered, if high-strung, boss."

It must have been tough for even the New Yorker's vaunted fact checkers to separate fact from fiction in the thicket of scuttlebutt surrounding Huffington, given that she requires her employees, journalists included, to sign nondisclosure agreements.

But "dark side of Arianna and the Huffington Post" was whispered about to the New Yorker's Lauren Collins in her interviews, we're told, and some such bits are worth repeating:

• One Los Angeles-based "editor" is assigned to read Huffington's emails aloud to her and replying according to the publisher's dictation. We admit, that sounds like pretty horrifying work. Even before considering Huffington's famous Greek accent.
• Other LA editors must schedule the hair appointments of at least one of Huffington's daughters, supposedly. We're starting to get a Miranda Priestly vibe.
• Editors are also to arrange for a repairman to fix the washing machine when it breaks. Granted, Huffington has staffers working from a hidden room in her Brentwood home, so they're handy, but can't Huffington have her housekeeper do this?
• In other housework, editors are reportedly tasked with hiding potentially controversial papers and books before reporters visit. What titles could Huffington have that would, despite her reputation for an eclectic and hungry intellect, be so damaging to her image?

More sensationally, Huffington's "top editors" are said to ghost write her posts on the site, with the publisher merely approving final drafts. It would be brazen for Huffington to flout her 2005 diktat that ghost writing "will never happen" at HuffPo. But not unimaginable, given the pressures on her time.

According to one tipster, Huffington's misjudgments don't stop with signing others' work as her own. Of the nine people who have quit the Los Angeles office in the past four months, one was an editor upset after Huffington called him or her a "retard," this person said. (HuffPo is said to have five regular LA staff positions, so it seems likely some of those who recently quit may have been in temporary positions or otherwise not part of the regular area team. HuffPo also has an office in New York.)

Huffington's varied careers, as the New Yorker noted, have included work as a "commentator... socialite... Republican political wife, a divorcée cable comedienne, a self-help writer, a progressive, an early environmentalist, a failed gubernatorial candidate, a blogger, an Internet mogul." Though gifted, in many ways, at relating to other people, particularly when it can advance her interests, Huffington is not a seasoned manager. Three years after the launch of HuffPo, it is understandable that she is apparently still struggling at holding together a staff.

But it would seem a dangerous gamble for Huffington to intentionally affect the brutality and off-the-wall demands of, say, Anna Wintour. It's not clear that a website like Huffington Post, bookmarked rather than subscribed to, will ever be able to comfortably lock in readers and advertisers like a Vogue, or to offer the same sort of glamor as a perquisite to staff. Becoming more competitive at hiring, meanwhile, is a matter of mere organization, of clearly defining job boundaries and of disciplining one's temper. And what better time for Huffington to do so than now, when the press is still writing profiles of the generally flattering sort?

• The New Yorker's Lauren Collins briefly depicts Huffington holding hands with ex-boyfriend Mort Zuckerman at the recent Time 100 party. But who is she seeing now? Is it true she tends toward hot younger men? What about her rumored dalliance with Newark Mayor Cory Booker?
• Collins also delves into the much-explored topic of Huffington's affiliation with spiritual guru John-Roger. But what about how she has stocked her site with fans of the culty leader?
• Just one paragraph on the Tim Russert feud? Can she still not come up with anything nice to say? Is it true top NBC News staff hated her even more after Russert died?
• How does Arianna run the Huffington Post? What's it like to work there? It's hardly surprising or scandalous that Huffington can be an "erratic... high-strung boss" or that she has lost 15+ employees, as reported in the profile. Sample quote: "One of the frustrating things was that she had absolutely no compunctions about saying, ‘Hey, do this,’ and then saying, ‘Why did you do that? I never asked you to do that.’"
• The New Yorker might start with HuffPo's political message discipline. Huffington has spiked work that is not "congruent with HuffPost's editorial position against the media's penchant for viewing everything through a left/right prism," a convoluted position she formulated after one of her columns was used against Barack Obama.
• Which raises the question: Was HuffPo biased toward Obama? After the site reported that Obama said "bitter" working-class Americans "cling to guns or religion," HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer, who himself said to be unhappy about the story, rushed to talk with angry Obama campaign operatives. That would be the same Lerer who convened a fundraiser for Obama at his apartment the year prior, when he was still CEO of Huffington Post. It's worth at least asking whether the Clinton campaign's accusation that the site was a "conveyor belt" for pro-Obama propaganda was more than mere campaign flackery.
• Also, why did HuffPo delay covering the latest scandal stories on Democratic politician John Edwards, despite having broken some of the earliest ones?
• If the HuffPo has been called an "internet newspaper," as the New Yorker reminds us, Collins would have been well-served to take a look at how much it spends on actual reporting. Mayhill Fowler, arguably its brightest star at the moment, paid her own expenses and received no salary. Huffington herself said many staff left because they "wanted to be writers.... the jobs are administrative."

To fit in some of these topics, the New Yorker might have had to cut out the bits about Huffington's "considerable intelligence," her "seductive" charm and how she likes hiking, "yoga, meditation and prayer." But at least the magazine would have broken some significant new ground.

UPDATE: The Huffington Post itself writes of the profile, "readers don't get much insight into how [Huffington] has actually pulled off this impressively successful website and gained a distinctly new status amid the bloody competition of the Internet."