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The first day of the Huffington Post offers blog items from Laurie David, Michael Isikoff, David Frum, David Mamet, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cusack, Mike Nichols and the husband-and-wife team of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall. There's also Harry Shearer announcing a media dishing column called Eat The Press. It won't do the "they're biased left/right" thing, but will look at how news is covered, Shearer says:
The idea is that the media have an agenda, all right, and it has precious little to do with poltical issues, at least the political issues of the outside world. It's an agenda, like that of most professions, that has to do with the politics, the economics, and the esthetics of the people who populate the profession itself.
There's also a blogroll and we're on it. But, the first error has already crept in. An HP news headline says "New York Times to start a blog," but it just links to an Editor & Publisher story about today's report by the NYT "credibility committee" that, as one of many recommendations, suggests the paper "consider creating a Times blog that promotes interaction with readers." The NYT also covers the report today, and runs a story on the business of blogging that focuses on Nick Denton and the Gawker empire. We learn the Gawkeroids (Defamer, Wonkette, Fleshbot etc) are required to post twelve times daily and write a once-weekly stroke to advertisers, receive base pay of $2,500 a month and get bonuses for increasing traffic.
Also: Mamet made fun of the Santa Monica hedge controversy in the LAT Sunday Opinion section, The High Drama of Tall Shrubbery.
* But: The NYT will cover blogs regularly in a Monday New Media column by David Carr, part of a redesigned business section.