New Age/New Media guru Arianna Huffington’s love of sleep is well documented. There’s the “sleep your way to the top—literally” TED talk, the sleep challenge and the famous AOL nap rooms. That story that she hides her three BlackBerrys in the bathroom while she sleeps is inextricable from her personal mythology. Read More
“I don’t think he did anything that extraordinary, to point out what Blacks themselves point out,” Taki Theodoracopulos told The Observer over the phone this afternoon.
He was talking about National Review journalist John Derbyshire’s controversial article, “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” written for Mr. Theodoracopulos’ namesake webzine, Taki’s Mag.
Within 72 hours after its publication, the Review announced that it was “parting ways” with Mr. Derbyshire, saying that the author was using the conservative publication’s name to “to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise.” National Review‘s Editor-In-Chief Rich Lowry said the piece “lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible.”
Mr. Theodoracopulos, who called himself a “great fan” of Taki’s Mag (which is actually edited by his daughter, while dad plays the role of curator, pulling in big names from his thick Rolodex), had his own opinion of why Mr. Derbyshire was let go. Read More
AOL will sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft in exchange for $1.056 billion in cash, the company announced today. The dial-up giant retained patents of 300 “core and strategic” technologies, which it will non-exclusively license to Microsoft in the same deal.
The auction for the patents began last fall, part of the company’s long term plan to “unlock value” for shareholders. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2012, and the company says it plans to return a significant portion of the proceeds to shareholders.
Meanwhile, WWD caught AOL and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington at her book party for Kathy Freston (Ms. Freston introduced Ms. Huffington to her business partner Kenneth Lerer), to find out how she felt about about her growing influence at AOL. Read More
New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Goldman kicked off his “Talk” with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong by revealing that Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the AOL-owned Huffington Post, was not very pleased with her own turn in the Q&A column.
AG: After AOL purchased The Huffington Post last year, I interviewed Arianna Huffington. She hung up on me and complained to my editors. So I was pleasantly surprised that you agreed to this interview.
TA: I read the interview when it came out, and it looked like it was rough. We don’t hold grudges around here.
Back in April, Mr. Goldman and Ms. Huffington got into it over the alleged red shift that had struck the news site, once known as the liberal’s Drudge Report, since its merger with AOL. Read More
Last night Atlantic Media chairman David Bradley had a couple dozen of New York’s non-fashion elite to dinner at Eleven Madison Park, kicking off a new monthly series that aims to capture the engagement with Atlantic cover stories demonstrated online by Facebook recommendations in a more intimate, in-person format.
Unlike the ill-fated salons proposed by The Washington Post in 2009, lobbyists can’t buy a seat at these off-the-record dinners; The Atlantic picked up the tab. The aim of the series, which may move to Los Angeles, Chicago, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C., depending on the cover story’s content, appears more earnest. Read More
Today Arianna Huffington stuck another pin her map of blog world domination.
Bienvenue, Le Huffington Post Québec!
Like other international HuffPo launches, Le Huffington Post Québec (HPQ) is a partnership with a local media company, Bell Canada and its agency Media Experts. But unlike the other publicized spin-offs and verticals, HPQ conspicuously lacks a celebrity editor or blogger. Read More
We’ve previously documented the wonderfully instigation-happy writing style of Alexia Tsotsis, the TechCrunch blogger who clearly knows something about severance packages at AOL that everyone else doesn’t. Because she’s at it again, writing like she wants to get fired, or at least test the limits of TechCrunch’s autonomy and/or Arianna Huffington’s patience. Read More
Le Huffington Post has found an editorial director in Anne Sinclair, wife of former I.M.F. director turned perp walk all-star Dominique Strauss-Kahn, reports L’Express.
Word reportedly got out because invitations to the site’s launch party on Monday listed Ms. Sinclair as a host. The Huffington Post France, like El Huffington Post, is a collaboration between the AOL-owned blog behemoth and a local paper, in its case, Le Monde. Read More
The Huffington Post has given up the name of its parenting blog, “Parentlode,” columnist Lisa Belkin announced yesterday.
The New York Times thought the name was too similar to that of its own parenting blog, “Motherlode,” which was written by Ms. Belkin until she moved to The Huffington Post two months ago.
When she Read More
IMPRESSIVE DISPLAYS OF CHUTZPAH
Alexia Tsotsis was a well-liked and popular tech blogger before she was at TechCrunch, back when she was at SF Weekly. She became even more well-liked and popular when Michael Arrington corralled her into going to TechCrunch, which was shortly before AOL bought the site out and promised Michael Arrington the full editorial autonomy to be as combative and belligerent with his new ownership as he had been with anyone with the past. Not long after, AOL chief content capo Arianna Huffington pushed Michael Arrington out to show him just how much autonomy the irascible feeding-hand-biting blogging mogul had. Because TechCrunch’s chief Kool-Aid mixer, Mr. Arrington, was out of the picture, some of the best TechCrunch writers on staff started quitting. Ms. Tsotsis has held out.
It is now safe to say she appears tired of holding out. Read More
