Nikke Finke of the LA Weekly brutally rips Arianna Huffington’s blog debut:

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 gets even better:

It almost seems like some sick hoax….Misstep after misstep…. Geffen’s people had to quietly tell Huffington to stop using his name as bait in her less-than-successful effort o fund the blog with Hollywood money.

To which Huffington resorts to flattery and a bribery:

When I asked Huffington about these and the other problems that befell her during the blog’s planning, she kept trying to change the subject, especially when the conversation focused on her blogmeister, Breitbart. Finally, she resorted to a different ploy: She extended an invitation to me to join her blog. (“When we were conceiving this, we said to each other, ‘Do you think we could we get Nikke Finke?’”)

And who saw this disaster coming? Certainly not the New York Times and Los Angeles Times that fell over themselves covering her plans with uncritical features and as Finke points out:

(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.)

Sheesh!

(full story)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 3:20 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.