Arianna's Blog Blows

LA Weekly reports Judging from today's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn't accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it's the disastrous clone of Tina Brown's Talk, JFK Jr.'s George or Maer Roshan's Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it's clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out.

Of course, only the fawning mainstream media didn't see this coming; instead, The New York Times, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times et al. were too busy breathlessly reporting Arianna's big plans and bons mots to bother to do any reporting. (The L.A. Times' praising of her preening is understandable, since the parent company's Tribune Media Services stupidly signed on to syndicate the blog's star blather.)

In fact, there's a juicy behind-the-scenes story: The L.A. Weekly has learned that the blog's start-up was god-awfully conceived from the get-go. That Hollywood biggies gave her concept the cold shoulder. That Huffington tried to use smoke and mirrors to fund her venture. That she never told her house celebs that she was putting in charge of her Hollywood blog the one bloggist best known nationally for hating everything and everyone Hollywood: former Drudge Report aide-de-camp Andrew Breitbart, author of the salacious anti-show-biz book Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon — The Case Against Celebrity. One of her Hollywood friends told me that "Arianna said merely she had somebody from this world of blogging to help her. She felt very secure someone they brought in knew what they were doing. People would have gone crazy here if they'd known it was the guy who wrote that awful book."

Kevin Aylward blogged Overall the site is very inviting to the casual reader. The layout is tight and makes good use of excepts. Selected blog posts down the left side of the front page, headlines and splashy tabloid-ish stuff on the right. Compared to sites like The Nation, Slate, or National Review Online it's much more blog-like. It does got to show that you can extend the generic blog layout into something appealing with the judicious use of design.

The Huffington Post (THP) is powered by Movable Type software so it's able to offer the kind of features (permalinks, comments, trackbacks, etc.) blog readers have come to expect, rather than having a subset of these functions bolted onto a content management system like the previously mentioned news magazines. Comments are allowed only in the news section, not the blog section where the "celebrity" bloggers post, and they're moderated throughout. Whether this will create an echo chamber remains to be seen, but even if it doesn't it will be interesting to see how long comments remain a feature.

Joe Gandelman blogged It'll be pooh-poohed by many bloggers but will probably carve out a niche. Maybe not a big one, but it'll get readers. The reason: part of the attraction of reading blogs seems to be to discover newer sources of news and opinion. But, then, some of the famous bloggers could really get into it as time goes on and their already-established talents plus the liberating feeling of blogging could propel them to new heights.

Steve Bainbridge blogged As for me, I think the LA Weekly's Nikki Finke put it nicely and succinctly: Arianna's Blog Blows

Mitch Berg blogged Take some advice, Arianna. Go to Blogspot. Start "Arianna's Joint". Start writing. See if anyone cares about what you say on its own merits. Maybe show up at Keegans to talk with people who can actually do the job. Get back to us in a year.

Hugh Hewitt, blogged The HuffingtonPost has launched, and it looks pretty good. Given what some people think of my design sense, though, that may be a verdict Arianna did not want. LAWeekly doesn't like Arianna's new effort. Perhaps if the HuffingtonPost takes phone sex ads, the Weekly will embrace it as one of its own.

James Joyner blogged One wonders by what yardstick Finke is measuring. THP has no SiteMeter or other public hit counter but I'd hazard a guess that it had tens of thousands of visitors in its first day, more than most blogs ever get. They had write-ups in major papers, including WaPo. InstaPundit linked them. Finke reports that many of the big names touted by Huffington's self promotion for the site failed to emerge and that most of the usual suspect liberal financiers stayed away. Fair enough. Air America proved that a lot of hype and a few big names don't guarantee success. Still, while I remain dubious of the long term prospects of a 300-member group blog Huffington should get more than a day to prove she can do it.

Jonah Goldberg blogged The LA Weekly does not like the Huffington Post. I for one haven't made up my mind. I hope the best for my friend Andrew Breitbart who's the go-to-guy for the operation. But lord knows I am not a fan of Huffington's. Indeed, I will continue to give it a chance (as I did in the post below), but I think from now on I will refer to it as the H-Post or some such so I don't have to keep advertising her name.

It was certainly the most hyped blog before it ever made its first post public. I think it deserves more than one day before we bury it.