Finally, as promised, the New York Times has brought opinions 'Online,' to the internet, with its new 'web log' thing, "Room for Debate." Lets' explore!

After being pwned by Politico, the Washington Post is launching a secret new political website in two weeks, and has hired TPM's Greg Sargent as blogger-in-chief. Politics and blogs, together? It just might work. [TPM]

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are locked in an obsessive death match. Only one newspaper can survive! But until one slays the other, they're mimicking each other's every move.

As print dies, we will no doubt see an avalanche of obituaries for once-great, now-decrepit publications. In this vein, The New Yorker's Louis Menand celebrates the Village Voice's heyday in the late 1950's and early 1960s.

Torontoist folding. No money in Toronto. [Torontoist]

No, it wasn't Andrew Sullivan or Michael Wolff who said it: Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave just said in his Nobel lecture to the Swedish Academy, "if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day." What a surprising show of faith in blogs (the ridicule specialists of "the internet") from the uber-elite! We remember when bloggers were the drunken, discretion-less, pajama-clad degenerates of the media world. Now they're saving the world, retroactively! Of course this is hopelessly naive.

We heard from a pretty good source that two Jossip-owned blogs—celebrity-focused Mollygood and black person-focused Stereohyped—are shutting down, probably due to the bad economy. And it's at least half confirmed, because Mollygood has just written a post confirming that she's gone [UPDATE: Now it's totally confirmed; additional goodbye post here]. They're both pretty decent blogs in their fields, so the appropriate response here is sadness. If you have more details we should know, feel free to email us; below, a small excerpt of Mollygood's goodbye [UPDATE 2: And a statement from Jossip boss David Hauslaib]:

Back in the day, bloggers who didn't do any reporting like Mickey Kaus and Jeff Jarvis and probably Glenn Reynolds used to spend a great deal of time talking about how the blogs (specifically their blogs) would soon supplant the "Main Stream Media" forever. Well, some years have passed, and the MSM is in dire straits, but blogs have not really made much of a dent in CNN and the New York Times' market share, eyeballs-wise, and the boundary-blurring has manifested itself mainly as old school publications getting a little more "webby" in tone and content. There is one metric, though, that has bloggers pulling ahead of their MSM counterparts: jail time! The Committee to Protect Journalists just released its 2008 prison census, and as you can see in the attached pie chart, internet people finally make up a greater share of the journo prison population than snooty newspaper jerks. Way to go, internet, and Burma! [CPJ]

Can Tina Brown and her newfangled "website" The Daily Beast singlehandedly provide refuge to all of New York's talented laid-off writers? Ha, no, of course not, not even a glimmer of a chance. She'll be lucky to get through the next two years without burning through tens of millions in start-up funds and flaming out like the Talk magazine of the internet. But there's no reason talented laid-off writers can't get a piece of that sweet monetary pie while it's here! The Observer notes that Tina's passing out freelance bylines to many deserving newly unemployed vets of dead publications like Radar and the New York Sun, like a blond Brit Santa with a media fetish. And the pay is not bad! Not by recession standards, at least:

When the Huffington Post reported last night that David Gregory would be the next host of Meet The Press, all the other online news sites treated it as a rumor. Then today Politico ran the same story, citing anonymous sources, and everyone accepted it as a confirmed fact. Why? It's just the new rules of online sourcing at work. The outsourcing of sourcing!

We were impressed last month when it was rumored that the Huffington Post may have raised $15 million in new investment, a big accomplishment for a media company at a time when the media economy is in the trash. Well, those rumors turned out to be false. Actually, HuffPo has raised $25 million from a venture capital firm. Amazing. So what will they do with all this cash?

Jeff Jarvis, former TV Guide and People TV critic and founder of Entertainment Weekly, is now an internet expert. He was one of those guys who became internet-famous back when there were like six bloggers, all of whom were guys whom 9/11 turned into HAWKISH ACTION HEROES, and they all brayed about the Islamist Menace and felt quite proud of themselves for being former liberals who grew balls and for some reason none of them went away? (Another one of those guys is Nick Denton!) Anyway! Then he became an internet futurist, which means spending a lot of time gloating about the death of print and babbling about the future of media gallivanting around to conferences and "consulting" and just wasting everyone's time with obnoxious writing and simplistic evangelizing for a miserable digital future. Now he's in an immature fight with Ron Rosenbaum, who is much smarter than he is, if also old and blinkered, about THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM. It's fucking bleak. Rosenbaum just took him down in Slate, partly for his new book about Google that happens to be just made up of things Jeff Jarvis thinks about Google. Here is the important part of the rant:

The FT, the Western world's last remaining respected financial paper not owned by Rupert Murdoch, has unveiled an early version of the redesign of its website's homepage. And we'll be damned if it doesn't look way more like a blog than like a traditional newspaper site. The clear messages: the online medium continues to assert its precedence over print; even the rich love blogs; and bloggers all deserve to be paid more money. Click here to peruse the prototype, or click through for a larger picture.

What's going on at The Corner, National Review's online peek into the id of the Conservative base? Jonah Goldberg, in his role as television-raised idiot manchild of The Right, has been posting weird movie clips all day. Kathryn Jean Lopez, Fairy Queen of NRO, has just been posting the crazier selections from her amazing inbox. Mark Hemingway doesn't really understand the laws surrounding "politcking" very well. And this is a particularly admirable example of "the polls are wrong" wishful thinking:

A reader asks, "Emily Gould and Keith Gessen—are they back together?" Emily Gould is a former editor of Gawker who wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about working at Gawker and dating a different Gawker editor who wrote a Page Six Magazine story about dating her. Then she started dating Keith Gessen, whom she'd written about, somewhat critically, on Gawker. Gessen is a novelist who co-founded a literary journal called n+1 and wrote a novel about being a dude named Keith who went to Harvard, like Keith Gessen. The journal and the novel are the Most Important Journal and Novel of Our Time, respectively. They dated, and then they broke up, and then Keith went to Russia, and we stopped writing about both of them, mostly. But apparently you, the readers, demand to know what's up! Here is THE SCOOP: Emily went to visit Keith in Russia. She stayed a month. Now she's back in New York. We suppose that sort of counts as "back together" except now, obviously, they are thousands of miles apart, again. (The kitten we got Keith that he couldn't take because he was going to Russia did find a home.) The End.

What is the saddest thing about the death of Radar? Its current weird zombie TMZ state? The way they locked everyone out of their computers and kicked them out on the streets? Here is a sad and oh-so-poignant symbol of how basically we are all fucked, in this industry: Wonkette founding editor and terribly famous, talented, and successful blogger Ana Marie Cox, who is often on TV and who still writes for Time, has set up a personal fundraising drive whereby donors can pay for her to cover the end of the McCain campaign and receive, in exchange, AMC's AIM screen name and, for big spenders, a post-election dinner! This is, appropriately enough, a political fundraising method, where donors get special access and personal attention for their cash. All it is missing is cute names for each tier, like Bush's "Rangers" and Hillary Clinton's "Hillraisers." As a model for the future of professional journalism, it is perhaps worrying! But you know we're all "marketing" our "personal brands," right? Now we are microtargeting, too. And once we are finally out of work, when Nick Denton decamps to his secret underground fortress to ride out the End Times, we will gladly email you, personally, 200 words on why Rachel Maddow is so popular in exchange for a hamburger. But who will donate to the commenters? The system is unsustainable!

The new editor of RadarOnline.com—presumably replacing Alex Balk—will be David Perel. He's the current editor of the National Enquirer! So what does he do on the same day that AMI buys the website and everyone there gets laid off? He tells CoverAwards, “I have already been contacted today by some top entertainment and news journalists who want to be part of this new venture. I am looking forward to putting together a new team that is the best of the best. We are hiring now!” Uh, is it just me or is that an enormous prick move?

National Review's The Corner is the best blog in America if you enjoy abject despair, self-delusion, denial, desperation, and embittered finger-pointing. As yet more conservatives defect from the McCain camp, Cornerites press on, demanding that the media investigate Obama's birth certificate and calling Democrat-endorsing Conservatives traitors to the cause. Today, National Review Online ran Kathleen Parker's amusing column on how McCain selected Palin because he wants to bone her. National Review Online editor (editor! she's in charge of the site!) Kathryn Jean Lopez posted to The Corner a bitchy, bitchy preemptive response to the column without mentioning it by name or linking to it. It's a wonder. Enjoy! [The Corner]

As rumored, AMI has bought the website RadarOnline.com, just as the print version of Radar folds. That, incongruously, puts the site under the same corporate umbrella as the celebrity mags Star and the National Enquirer, which may now become off-limits for mockery. The site will be "relaunched" in 2009. Judging from the tone of the press release alone, the site may well be repositioned to be far more credulous in its celebrity coverage, and consequently less funny. The effect on the RadarOnline staff is not clear yet; we'll fill in details as they come. Full press release from AMI below: American Media Inc. and Integrity Multimedia Company form joint venture to launch a new and enhanced RadarOnline web site

Elizabeth Spiers is doing a new thing! Spiers, the Gawker founding editor-turned-media mini-mogul and closely watched savant of the blog business, is already talking about her next project, which doesn't have financial backers yet. It's going to be an "online magazine" (translation: blog) aimed at women. Uh oh, does that mean she's taking on our sister Jezebel?