Miami Herald to Launch Caliente Tabloid This Month

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McClatchy Co.-owned The Miami Herald this month will debut Caliente, a tabloid aimed at the city's substantial Spanish-speaking community.

Initially uncovered by the Random Pixels blog and later reported by The Huffington Post, roughly 70,000 copies of Caliente will be distributed to targeted neighborhoods in Little Havana and Hialeah beginning Sept. 18. Caliente will not be staffed by reporters from either the Miami Herald or its Spanish counterpart, El Nuevo Herald, according to the HuffPo article. The tabloid will include Latin American news, celebrity gossip, sports, horoscopes, articles about telenovelas and, in what already is a lightning rod attracting criticism, a Chica Caliente feature boasting a bikini model.

Ay! Caramba. Maybe the tabloid should be called Sol because it apes Rupert Murdoch's The Sun in its penchant for scantily clad women.

L.A. Outpost of HuffPost Live is Dead

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Online video network HuffPost Live is boosting its international presence, while pulling the plug on its Los Angeles office and studio, according to reports by TheVerge.com and mediabistro.com TV Newser blogs.

Twenty staffers in the LA location are affected by the move, though reportedly many were offered the chance to relocate to The Huffington Post's New York City home base. HuffPost Live's workforce of roughly 100 crank out 12-16 hours of live video content daily, a costly venture that, thus far,  has not yielded the numbers of viewers HuffPo had hoped for.  The Verge estimates a monthly live audience of about two million HuffPost Live viewers.

The news aggregator's decision to expand HuffPost Live globally follows the recent departure of hosts, including Jacob Soboroff and Alicia Medendez.

BuzzFeed Foreign Matters

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BuzzFeed, the social media Web site that editorially tracks viral content, plans to expand foreign news coverage by adding an editor and a half-dozen reporters, the New York Times reported today.

BuzzFeed Editor Ben Smith said users' reliance on the platform during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage helped prompt the decision to expand its presence in Washington, D.C. and into Cairo and Mexico. BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti also co-founded The Huffington Post, which also has expanded foreign news coverage with bureaus in Canada and Europe and will also unveil an edition in Japan this year, according to the Times article.

HuffPo Cites Politico Journo Layoffs

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The Huffington Post yesterday reported that five-year-old Politico has trimmed its editorial staff, but the Rosslyn, Va.-based online political news organization denies the job reduction is a sign of distress.

HuffPo singled out photographer Jess Kamen, who tweeted that Politico had cut him loose, and technology reporter Jay Westcott, whom HuffPo sources said was also let go, as among those pink-slipped. Reporter Dave Catanese resigned from Politico last week. The HuffPo article did not report on the total number of editorial positions affected by the layoffs. Politico's editorial staff is 156 strong, according to a Washington Post article.

Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris insists his organization is growing, and is up 30 employees compared to last year, when its editorial and business workforce reportedly exceeded 225. HuffPo has previously reported that Politico was diverting resources to Politico Pro, a subscribers-only service concentrating on policy.

Whether Politico is shrinking or merely restructuring remains unclear, though axed staffers probably care little about the distinction. If only certain actual Washington Politicos would follow suit and leave their jobs, the nation would be better off.

No Rule-Changing Mid-game: Judge Says Unpaid HuffPo Writers Will Stay That Way

Jonathan Tasini . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge John Koeltl ruled last Friday  in Jonathan Tasini v. America Online, Inc. (Case No. 1:11-cv-02472-JGK) that just because The Huffington Post hit the mother lode when Internet Service Provider AOL acquired the news aggregator for $315 million (see "TUOL" post 2/7/11), uncompensated HuffPo writers were not entitled to payment after the fact.

Authors Molly Secours and Jonathan Tasini were among writers whose work appeared on the Web site of The Huffington Post, which was founded in 2005. As reported by the New York Law Journal and The Wall St. Journal Law Blog, the plaintiffs sued for upward of $105 million, alleging they were deceived by Arianna Huffington into writing for the site gratis in exchange for the exposure that appearing on the popular site purportedly would generate.

In granting the defendant's motion to dismiss, Judge Koeltl said the plaintiffs, many of whom are professional journalists, knew they weren't getting paid for having their work published on the HuffPo site.  "No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to The Huffington Post for publication," Judge Koeltl wrote, "and the plaintiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation. The principles of equity and good conscience do not justify giving the plaintiffs a piece of the purchase price when they never expected to be paid; repeatedly agreed to the same bargain and went into the arrangement with eyes wide open."

The plaintiffs advanced both an implied-in-law contract argument to prevent unjust enrichment to AOL, and alleged the defendant's purported deceptive conduct violated New York General Business Law sec. 349.  The case brought by the unpaid contributors was dismissed with prejudice by the Court.

Christian Metal Rocker Rocks MSNBC's Rachel Maddow with $50m Suit

Image via WikipediaMinnesota-based Christian rocker and radio talk show host Bradlee Dean has filed a $50 million complaint alleging defamation and false light in the District of Columbia Superior Court against MSNBC gabber Rachel Maddow.

The case, Bradlee Dean & You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International v. NBC Universal et al. (Case No. 0006055-11) arises from an August 9, 2010, segment of Maddow's prime-time program that cited the following quote from Dean on his radio show:

"Muslims are calling for the execution of homosexuals in America. They themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible, the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than the American Christians do. Because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination. If America won't enforce the laws, God will raise up a foreign enemy to do just that."

According to an article in The Huffington Post, Dean alleges Maddow deliberately ignored Dean's disclaimer that he was not calling for the killing of gays. In fact, after broadcasting Dean's statement, Maddow read Dean's disclaimer: "[W]e have never and will never call for the execution of homosexuals."

The Rev. Bradlee Dean (Smith) is drummer for the Junkyard Prophet Christian metal rock band and  pastor of the You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Christian youth ministry that allegedly includes among its beliefs that gay people were responsible for the Holocaust.  He claims the defendants, including Maddow, MSNBC and The Minnesota Independent, took his statements out of context.

Although the 10-page Complaint acknowledges Maddow read the disclaimer on air, it alleges she "did so in a manner that gave the impression to the audience that Dean's disclaimer was disingenuous, insincere, false and meaningless." The ever-humble "TUOL" legal team wouldn't be surprised if the court similarly describes the Complaint at some point down the line.

With a Huff & a Puff, AOL Blows Its Budget--Acquires Huffington Post

Image via WikipediaIn a joint press release,  Internet Services Provider America Online and The Huffington Post news and lifestyle Web site announced that AOL ("Another Outrageous Layout") has acquired the Post for $315 million, $300 million of which will be paid in cash.

Arianna Huffington will front the newly created  Huffington Post Media Group ("HPMG"), following the sale, which is expected to be completed sometime during the first or second quarter of 2011.  The press release boasts that the new entity will reach 117 million Americans and a global audience of 270 million.

Besides the Huffington Post, which was founded in 2005, HPMG will incorporate all AOL content, including MapQuest, Moviefone and TechCrunch.  By how much depends on whom you're reading, but analysts reacting to the acquisition seemed unanimous in stating that AOL overpaid for the Post.  Benchmark Co. analyst Clayton Moran was quoted by Reuters as stating that AOL paid 32 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for The Huffington Post, amounting to 40 percent of AOL's cash on-hand.


A Washington Post account of the transaction cites the Post's anticipated total sales in 2011 as $50 million, making AOL's purchase price more than six times the projected revenue of its new acquisition.  AOL offers a large sales force to bolster the Post's earnings, but the move is seen by some as a desperate attempt by AOL to become relevant again, after being spun off from its disastrous  merger with Time Warner in 2009.

Dem Consultants Go Off on a 'Huff' in Lawsuit Against News Aggregator

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The guardian.co.uk Web site reports today on a 26-page complaint filed in the Supreme Court of New York (Peter Daou & James Boyce  v. Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer & TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.) in which two Democratic politicos allege breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, idea misappropriation, unjust enrichment, quantum meruit, fraud, negligent misrepresentation and breach of implied contract against the co-founders of  The Huffington Post news aggregator.


According to their lawsuit, Daou & Boyce are being deprived of an ownership interest in HuffPost by the defendants, whom they accuse of stealing their idea for the influential Web site that launched in 2005. According to the Guardian account, Daou has pledged to donate any proceeds from the lawsuit to progressive political causes.


Huffington & Lerer released a statement to the Politico Web site denying the plaintiffs' accusations, and asserting that Daou & Boyce had no role in the creation, financing or operation of TheHuffingtonPost Web site. The defendants allege they rejected hiring or entering into a partnership with the plaintiffs six years ago.

The lawsuit is in its nascent stage as the defendants have yet to file an answer to the complaint. The defendants should have no problem mounting a defense with the money that they don't pay Web site contributors, but Arianna probably wishes she had the "bus money" she doled out to transport New Yorkers to the Stewart/Colbert Rally for Sanity in Washington, D.C. last month.