In your yet-another-synonym-for-"snowy" Wednesday media column: HuffPo no longer cool, The Daily's latest launch date, Demand Media's distressingly popular, Michael Cohen leaves the Village Voice, Newsday hires people, and Brian Lehrer's a reasonable guy.

  • Interesting piece here from Mike Elk, the unpaid blogger for Huffington Post who was "fired" (from his job as an unpaid blogger) after he got a press pass to a labor rally and then passed it off to some union guys, who used it to get in and disrupt the event. "Now, with actions like my dismissal and the hiring of mainstream establishment journalists like Howard Fineman and Peter Goodman, it's signaling that it is abandoning its guerilla roots and adopting a more mainstream, corporate style of objective journalism," writes Elk. That's a polite way of saying that HuffPo is wildly inconsistent as a notional "real journalism" operation. As are many internet blogs! A good thing for a rabble-rousing labor journalist to do next would be to get all of HuffPo's unpaid bloggers to quit. And see what happens!
  • Your daily update on the current tentative launch date of News Corp's iPad newspaper The Daily: it's coming in the next two weeks! Don't forget about The Daily, any time soon!
  • Shares of robotic "content farm" Demand Media have risen more than 35% today following the company's IPO. Is Demand Media the dystopian future of media? Yes it is.
  • Michael Cohen has stepped down as publisher of the Village Voice, a job he's held since 2006. If you know of any interesting backstory here, email me.
  • In uncommonly positive newspaper news, Newsday has hired 31 people! They can use the help.
  • WNYC radio man Brian Lehrer is just as maddeningly level-headed as you would imagine.

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