Which meant I cut my teeth on the likes of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, some really phenomenal interviews by Playboy contributors, and excellent short stories in what are generally considered pop culture outlets. Rolling Stone remains the home of some solid political columns with an attitude, like that of Matt Taibbi; I’m sure some of us have pointed to or discussed his work as just one example.

For men like my spouse who catches the news in 30 seconds at a time between flights in airports and in emails spammed to his Blackberry by moronic corporate friends, content which shows up in pop culture outlets may be the only thing that breaks through the fog of info in which he lives. HuffPo might have to do, and it might just do it.

Now if only Arianna could pull together the kind of short fiction Playboy once had, like Atwood, Oates, Dick, Ellison, Bradbury…

[edit: just dawned on me that Robert Scheer, who did the only Playboy interview of a presidential candidate in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, is a contributor at HuffPo. Wonder who else I’ve missed?]

[… THE DUMBNESS OF THE WHALE/Washington Post edition: We hadn’t read The Huffington Post in some time. Yesterday, when we went there, we remembered why.

Until recent decades, the public discourse was maintained by a carefully picked “elite”—the Edward R. Murrow crowd. Regular rubes weren’t allowed to take part in these august discussions.

At yesterday’s Huffington Post, we began to remember why.

No, it really doesn’t make sense to report on “rumors”—or to cry, weep, sob and complain when the subject of your “rumors” tells you that you’ll have to stop. (For the most part, even the mainstream press corps doesn’t report on “rumors”—for example, by telling us how many weeks the “rumors” have been in circulation.) And Paul Begala’s post was simply the work of a new, degraded man—a person who has begun to talk way down to the crowd. (In the past, that wasn’t his way.) Meanwhile, did we say, just yesterday, that elite criticism of Palin has often been designed to tag her as “trailer trash?” Those kinds of elites are at HuffPo too, we saw when we read this sad, inane post. Headline: “Reading the Pictures: Palin Proud To Be Trash.” … ]

http://www.dailyhowler.com/index.shtml

the problem is, i suspect, as with all media, is the editors and producers. imagination and daring is NOT their game. neither is being too far ahead of the herd. they are careerists with mortgages to pay and years to go before they could take a risk – but then they are not constitutionally inclined to take a risk.

me neither.

huffington post is a smart-alec, mainstream look-alike, with a way-too-busy front page, a penchant for giving a voice to “famous people” with absolutely nothing useful to contribute to the public discourse, and an editorial predilection to exploit science and sex to sell.

still,

they do provide a home for a few educational voices -

if these can be heard amidst all the “noise” (in an information technology sense) the site generates.

Pulling together both the dishy and the wonky content makes politics more accessible to the younger voter as well as the the disaffected folks who might not have participated in politics in the past.

Just skim past the tabloid stuff. You’ll find there are some serious people who’ve already been populating the pages.

And Nico. Good gravy, what would coverage of Iran post-election have been like without him crunching away, making HuffPo the place to be? This was the intersection of the tabloid, the political and the blog; we’ll continue to see more of this, including copycatters.

And bad copycats will fail and stink; personally, I’d rather weed past HuffPo’s tab content than try and stomach WSJ liveblogging of MJ’s memorial today. Yeesh…now that’s just plain bad.

For me, bad news it had to be HuffPo — It started off so well, then began rapidly descending into Tabloid Junk, interspersed with few and far between original reporting. Iran elections are one of those notable exceptions.

I don’t quite understand why HuffPo gets any respect at all in the left blogosohere. A more liberal drudge with NY Post and TMZ added and a bunch of guest columnists who generally speaking don’t have much in the way of enduring commentary… Average shelf-life there: about 18 hours, before new salacious stuff screams from the pictured headlines atop each page.

Maybe with Froomkin there he can make it a respectable joint. But to do so, they’d also have to reformat to something that takes itself just a bit more seriously.

My view of Arianna plummeted with the past year of Huffington Post. It’s one thing to ensure a profitable venture — so that people like Froomkin CAN be hired. It’s another to present 50-75% junk everyday in order to do so.

“WASHINGTON, July 7 (Reuters) – The Obama administration said on Tuesday that only voluntary statements by foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison should be used as evidence at their military trials or else convictions could be reversed on appeal.”