media deathwatch

Arianna Huffington Is Taking Over the Metro Tomorrow

The Huffington Post honcho will try her hand at print for a day. Elsewhere in the world of media, print and online organizations make cautious advances toward one another.

• Arianna Huffington is guest-editing the Metro tomorrow. [Metro]

• The News & Observer Publishing Company, a subsidiary of the McClatchy Company that owns community newspapers in North Carolina, is cutting 78 staffers, or 11 percent of its workforce. “We must make these additional cuts to sustain our company and adjust to new competitive and economic realities,” said publisher Orage Quarles III. [FishbowlNY/Mediabistro]

• Condé Nast is planning cuts to the Condé Nast Media Group, which handles most of the company’s revenue. [Ad Age]

• Naysayers doubt the web-only version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will succeed. “Those who have run the numbers tend to agree that the advertising revenue just isn’t there yet to make a general-interest, journalism-intensive website pay for itself,” says Jeff Bercovici. [Mixed Media/Portfolio]

AOL is paying them no heed. The company has hired Carl Cannon, Walter Shapiro, and Patricia Murphy for a politics site launching next month. But site editor Melinda Henneberger said AOL’s goal is “quality news sites that have zero aggregation, original content, that pay writers a living wage, and that pay bloggers.” [Wrap]

• Nor is the Times, which today ponders the possibly bright future of local reporting. “We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest,” said Steven Johnson. “But of course, that’s what the web can do.” [Opinionator/NYT]

Arianna Huffington Is Taking Over the Metro Tomorrow