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Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan is leaving the company, slated to be replaced later this week by Softbank Capital's Eric Hippeau. Morgan was first hired in 2007.

The news was first reported on Monday by PaidContent.

Hippeau has been serving on the board of the left-leaning news outlet, which was co-founded by pundit Arianna Huffington in 2005, since its first round of venture funding in 2006. The former chairman and CEO of Ziff Davis Media, he's on the board of a number of different companies including Yahoo. His new role at Softbank will be "special partner and adviser."

In December, the Huffington Post raised another $25 million in funding. It was riding a wave of popularity--and scrutiny, considering its controversial views on paying for content and labor--in the wake of the 2008 presidential election, and was starting to aggressively expand coverage beyond politics. Long-term profitability, however, was still a question mark.

"We've had a really good year, ad-wise," Morgan said to CNET News in an interview shortly before the presidential election. "We're in the game at a different point in our life cycle than the other mainstream players. We've seen the brand really grow to top of mind with both agencies and clients and the response has been really positive."

236.com, a comedy site developed as a joint venture between liberal news site The Huffington Post and Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, will be a joint venture no more. The site will become a Huffington Post subsidiary and is slated to be re-branded as "Huffington Post Comedy." Financial terms were not disclosed.

"After a successful first year as a standalone comedy site we are excited to bring 236 into The Huffington Post as we launch our comedy vertical," Huffington Post co-founder and namesake Arianna Huffington said in a release Tuesday. "We look forward to creating a section that serves not only as a one-stop-shop for humor with a satirical take on the news but a spirited community for all comedy lovers."

Reports surfaced in December that IAC was looking to spin off some of its smaller properties, 236.com possibly among them.

Though it began as a political news site, the Huffington Post has gradually expanded into other news and lifestyle areas to broaden its coverage. The "Comedy" section created from 236.com will join sections like entertainment, media, and "green" news.

The Huffington Post closed a $25 million funding round in December.

Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post has announced its latest venture funding round. The upswing: It is $25 million, not $15 million as previously rumored.

The funding comes from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Oak Venture Partners. No valuation was provided, but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher suggests it's slightly under $100 million. The company has 46 employees.

Fred Harman of Oak Venture partners will join Huffington Post's board. Previous investors include Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners.

This is the company's Series C funding round. Traffic to its Web site skyrocketed amid the hotly contested presidential election this fall, but The Huffington Post--started by a team led by political pundit and author Arianna Huffington--has been making strides to expand beyond the left-of-center political coverage that made it famous. Political news sites, many critics speculate, may see a significant drop in traffic now that there's no presidential election filling up headlines, and that's not a good thing when ad spending is tightening amid the economic downturn.

Local news, more video, and a fund for investigative journalism are next on the plate for Huffington Post, according to a press release, in addition to possible acquisitions. There is also a "world news" page in the works, hinted a source close to the company, who added that other coverage areas such as sports are discussed but are further from a launch.

DANA POINT, Calif.--When political pundit Arianna Huffington, along with a team of digital-media veterans, launched political news aggregator The Huffington Post in 2005, critics were skeptical of the left-leaning site. But it's turned out to be one of political journalism's great recent success stories, even amid controversy over the charismatic and opinionated Huffington and the site's business model, which utilizes thousands of unpaid bloggers in addition to full-time reporters.

Just over a year ago, The Huffington Post hired Betsy Morgan, head of CBSNews.com, to serve as its CEO, taking over from co-founder and former AOL executive Ken Lerer.

Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan

At the WebbyConnect summit this week, where Morgan was a featured speaker, CNET News caught up with her to find out just what the site plans to do after the presidential election that has carried it to the heights of digital fame.

Q: The Huffington Post has been riding high on the 2008 election, with ComScore numbers naming it as the top independent political destination on the Web. But everyone's acknowledging that traffic may drop significantly after the election. What is the company's strategy for this?
Morgan: That's a question that I feel like I've been asked a lot in the last couple of weeks. I think all news and information sites have been up this year. We look at our competitors' traffic really closely, too, and that political tide has lifted everybody's boats. I think a couple of things are going to happen after the election. One, what we've certainly seen over the interest in this election is that people are re-energized by the political process and they're very interested, particularly in light of the economy, in what a new administration will look like.

Because of that, you'll continue to see interest in that, in the new administration and who gets picked for what positions and what's the first thing they do and the second thing they do. Does the new president go abroad immediately and try to mend fences? Those kinds of things. I think there's still going to be a big interest in what's going on in Washington.

Do you have different strategies for if Barack Obama wins the election versus if John McCain wins?
Morgan: What's interesting about that is, that question assumes and even reading the headline in ComScore assumes that we are just a political site. Our tagline is "the Internet newspaper." So back to your original question, which I think answers the second question. We've worked really hard over the past year to grow all of our verticals, to launch a bunch of verticals. A bunch are new since this time last year...we have a lot of traffic coming to non-politics stuff, and prior to the most recent sort of frenzy of run-up and countdown, our traffic was sort of about 50-50, so 50 percent to political stories and 50 to everything else.

So we have really consciously grown and attracted an audience that's interested in a whole lot of things besides politics. I do think that one of the things that will be very interesting to see is the obsessiveness with which people are watching the election and being interested in the political process. We're also seeing that behavior on the business side with the economy every day: what happened to the Dow and what happened to the other economic numbers. We're seeing huge traffic for us in those areas so that in November and December, there may be more of a balance.

Have you been shifting resources to covering the financial crisis in more depth?
Morgan: Coverage of the economy folds into so many other parts of our verticals. The economy is tied so closely to politics that some of our politics writers and editors are writing about politics and also the economy: the impact, and what McCain thinks about the economy and what Obama thinks about the economy. The media vertical's another area. Media companies are laying off, their stock prices are getting hit, they're going through changes, they're prepping for the downturn, so that's business-related, too. So the economy is a big story across the board in many different areas, and that's how we're attacking it rather than, "No more style coverage! Start working on those Dow Jones charts!"

What's your election night tech strategy? Will Huffington Post have extra server power in? Will you be auto-refreshing the home page faster?
Morgan: Such a good question when you say auto-refresh. We turned off auto-refresh last December and we've got an AJAX dynamically delivered page. That was a decision we consciously made at the end of last year because we just felt that our page views were not authentic and that we wanted to see more authentic page view numbers, and the auto-refresh thing seems like a thing of the past, though a lot of news sites still use it.

In terms of election night coverage on the tech side, we did a pretty robust tech infrastructure overhaul over the winter in prep for a lot of fall traffic. The management team is in constant communication with the tech team. As we're hitting these record page view numbers daily, can our servers handle this? Can they handle 5x, 10x, 100x, whatever? Having come from a place that dealt with that stuff in spades, at CBS, I'm familiar with that super, super spike in traffic.

What was something that you wanted to do in election coverage and couldn't do for one reason or another?
Morgan: There isn't anything kind of top-of-mind. I think everybody feels like they've been pretty happy with the coverage we've done. I'd say, what could we do more of? We probably could've done a little bit more live blogging. But we feel like we've done a good job of engaging our bloggers.

What are some digital-politics features or applications that other media companies or Web sites have done that you think are really impressive?
Morgan: Yahoo's got a great electoral map that includes Huffington Post picks on who wins the electoral college in what states and what numbers that I think is pretty interesting. I think people like the kind of compare-and-contrast experience. We've liked working with them. AOL's done some interesting things with bloggers, sort of getting voices of bloggers and then getting real-time reaction, and they started that really, really early in the process.

On the mainstream news sites I've got to give everybody credit. I think everybody's evolved from this time last year, maybe having candidate pages, to experiences that are much more interactive where as a consumer you can add value and community.

People say that 2004 was the election where blogs took off and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube took off. What will people be saying was the digital trend that took off in the 2008 elections?
Morgan: What you've seen now in this political cycle is, you've really seen the blogosphere and both individual and mainstream news affect the political process. With Off the Bus, our citizen journalism program with NYU, we've had 12,000 citizens contributing and covering stories across the country, going to rallies, sitting in on conference calls, and really being able to bubble up all that information for mainstream media. It's been fantastic. They've broken a bunch of stories. So I definitely think that it's the rise of the empowerment of the individual journalist or the citizen journalist.

Media is getting hit hard in this economic climate. Ad-supported companies are getting hit hard. And there's a chance that The Huffington Post, like other sites, will see a traffic drop after the election. Are you going to have to do any layoffs?
Morgan: We don't anticipate that. We've had a really good year, ad-wise. We're in the game at a different point in our life cycle than the other mainstream players. We've seen the brand really grow to top of mind with both agencies and clients and the response has been really positive.

I do think everyone's looking at 2009 and thinking, "Do the projections I did in July still apply in 2009?" That's true, totally, across the board. But Internet advertising is still hugely more measurable, of great interest to more and more advertisers, and the value proposition of The Huffington Post is a strong one. You get not just politics, you get a ton of other news and information. It's a growing site and in terms of the audience it attracts, and granted this will change a bit as we get bigger, but it's a real influencer, educated audience, which I think will continue to be attractive to advertisers.

On the flip side, as a recent New Yorker article about Arianna Huffington highlighted, to some critics that demographic is known as "limousine liberals." Are you going to be changing your strategy at all to appeal to, dare I say, average Americans?
Morgan: For any news site, as it gets bigger the demographics change. Our advertising guys look at our demographics very carefully, and I don't think ComScore has a category for "limousine liberals," but our profile, our average user looks like the average user for other news sites, and we feel that we are in that sweet spot along with the other guys like CNN and MSNBC.

Did you have to do any damage control after that New Yorker piece?
Morgan: I thought the piece was great!

True, it wasn't as scathing as some people had expected. So, obviously, The Huffington Post has taken great steps to differentiate itself from just being Arianna Huffington's site. But how central is she to the operation? Should she decide to retire, would you have a Steve Jobs sort of situation where the heart of the company would be gone?
Morgan: Arianna is the most tireless worker in this whole company. She's a total force of nature, and she is a huge, huge promoter of the site, obviously. And we're absolutely grateful for all of her great energy and outreach and she's a very hard worker on not just being an external face of the business but being hugely influential inside the company as well as editor-in-chief. If you look at the company and how it's grown over the last year, we have a really solid management team. It's very much of a business structure, it's very evolved from what was started three years ago as a blog and aggregated news site into something more mainstream and more comprehensive. We're growing. And Arianna's a living brand and she's fantastic, but the site does a lot more than just politics.

On that note, you made your first foray into local news recently with Chicago. How's that going? When will we see more?
Morgan: Soon! You'll definitely see the next local vertical soon.

Which one?
Morgan: We're working on it. I won't name the city. But what we've been able to see with Chicago, and this a hallmark of The Huffington Post, because the team is nimble and agile and we have a very small team dedicated to Chicago--one editor--we can tweak...being able to tweak fast and quickly, on the fly has been huge.

Liberal news site The Huffington Post may just have expanded into eco-news, but the downtown New York-based company isn't stopping there: Local news sites are on the way, starting with a Chicago edition. And it will be raising more venture money to fund the expansion.

Huffington Post co-founder and namesake Arianna Huffington made the announcement at a conference hosted by the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper, which published a story Thursday. A Huffington Post representative confirmed the news to CNET News.com later that day.

The company is not yet announcing any partnerships with local news outlets, and according to the Guardian, the Chicago edition of the site will have only one editor to start. But "dozens" of future city editions are on the way, Huffington said.

It's crucial for the Huffington Post to lock down a solid audience, considering it began as a left-leaning political news outlet and some critics have been concerned that it will see a major drop in traffic after the 2008 U.S. election. But representatives have said that half the site's traffic now comes from outside the "Politics" section, and adding local news to the mix (if it proves successful) will mean more from beyond the election-junkie crowd.

The round of venture capital to finance this development is the Huffington Post's third, following $5 million in 2006 and $5 million in 2007. The company's lead investor is Softbank Capital, and additional capital has come from Greycroft Partners and former AOL execs Ken Lerer (a Huffington Post co-founder) and Bob Pittman of the Pilot Group.

Earlier this month, the Silicon Alley Insider reported that the Huffington Post was looking to raise about $10 million, bringing its valuation to $80 million.

This post was updated to add additional detail about the Huffington Post's venture round.

The crowd at the New York Tech Meetup.

(Credit: David Karp)

NEW YORK--Typically, the monthly New York Tech Meetup is an opportunity for the unpolished founders of brand-new local start-ups to go up onstage, talk about their companies for five minutes, and risk heckling from an audience of 400.

But for the Internet Week New York installment of the gathering on Tuesday evening, host (and Meetup.com founder) Scott Heiferman invited a handful of Gotham tech success stories to talk about the state of their companies. Needless to say, the presentations were a little bit slicker, and the "How're you going to make money?" question, a staple for the green Tech Meetup regulars, was understandably absent.

Heiferman also took a jab at the previous night's press conference by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which kicked off Internet Week. Heiferman noted that the only tech company mentioned three times in Bloomberg's speech had been Google, a company that has a huge presence in the city but originated in the Valley. Bloomberg had added that he'd been on a tour of Google's New York office, to which Heiferman surveyed the techies in the room and asked, "Let's see a show of hands--how many of you have had Mayor Mike come and tour your office?"

Here's what else went down:

Kevin Ryan, co-founder and chairman of AlleyCorp, parent company of a number of properties including Panther Express and the Silicon Alley Insider, said that the company would be raising new venture funding in about the next two months. Ryan, an original founder of DoubleClick, also hailed New York's burgeoning tech culture, estimating that the city has produced about $35 billion in tech assets over the past decade. That makes it second only to the Bay Area.

DailyCandy's Catherine Levene said that the 8-year-old women's e-mail newsletter will be launching seven new localized editions of its DailyCandy Kids lists, capitalizing on the hot online parenting niche. As for longer-term plans, Levene said the company was "never really founded as an e-mail company; it was founded as a content company...We look to our future as beyond e-mail." The site will see more national and international editions, an expanded Web site, and potentially content more than once a day. That'd kind of render the name obsolete, but hey, that's just a triviality.

Rob Kalin, founder of handmade goods marketplace and cult favorite Etsy, said that 15,000 to 20,000 items are sold on the site every day. Etsy, which was founded two-and-a-half years ago in Brooklyn, just hired a COO and is looking forward to more growth. "It's a matter of time before Wal-Mart is just out of business," Kalin said of Etsy's handmade, buy-local mantra in the face of rising fuel costs that may render cheap labor not-so-cheap. "I wish I could be around to see it. He then admitted that Etsy actually shares a board member with Wal-Mart Stores.

Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan and co-founder Jonah Peretti dismissed criticisms that the liberal-leaning news aggregation site's traffic could plummet after 2008 election buzz quiets down, saying that over half the site's traffic now comes from its non-politics sections. "We're in six verticals, (and) we're going to many more," Morgan said. The Huffington Post now "employs" 1,600 unpaid bloggers but has fewer than 50 full-time employees, and has seen its traffic triple in the past seven months.

TheLadders founder and CEO Mark Cenedella showed off the white-collar job search site's slick interface, and reminisced about when he showed up at the first-ever New York Tech Meetup. There were eight people at the meetup and 22 on TheLadders' payroll; now there are 400 people at each Meetup (with a waiting list) and 240 TheLadders employees.

The chief technology officer and general product manager from Heiferman's own Meetup showed off an impressive impending relaunch of the site, which is designed to be "simpler and easier to use." Among the updates to Meetup are a location directory (the company is "starting to talk to Yelp" about a possible partnership with the business-reviews site), an integration with Amazon Payments to offer payment options besides PayPal, a "Meetup Alliances" feature to make networks of local groups, and a tweak to require people to pay before they RSVP to an event. There's also an Italian-language launch of the site on the way to reflect its popularity in Italy, and "crowdsourcing" efforts will translate it into more languages.

David Uyttendaele, CTO of print-and-ship on-demand service Mimeo now has an employee count of 550 and prints 2 million to 3 million pages per night. That's huge for a company that many people in the city still haven't heard of, perhaps because it's geared toward enterprise clients. The company also recently launched "Mimeo Marketplace," a way for document manufacturers to sell their creations.

Chris Phenner, vice president of business development at mobile content marketplace Thumbplay, said that there are over 80,000 ringtones, videos, games, and graphics available for download for a $10 monthly fee. The company is also "so very, very close" to letting independent content creators sell their own media through the service.

The Huffington Post, the news aggregation and commentary site founded by political pundit Arianna Huffington and former AOL exec Ken Lerer, is finally jumping on the post-Al-Gore bandwagon.

The company announced Wednesday that it will be launching HuffPost Green, a site division specific to "green" content through a content partnership with Discovery Communications' Planet Green channel as well as TreeHugger, the popular eco-news blog that Discovery acquired last year.

If you're like me, your reaction to this news might've been, "What? You mean there isn't a 'green' section already?" The New York-based Huffington Post got its start as a liberal answer to the wildly popular Drudge Report news site, and while it's since branched beyond its political roots, it remains targeted toward a well-educated, left-leaning audience.

But although it runs sections pertaining to politics, media, entertainment, business, and "living," as well as a comedy site called 23/6 in conjunction with IAC, there still hadn't been a section devoted to the unavoidably trendy niche of environmental media. Until now.

"HuffPost Green will focus on eco news and trends--from style and eco-conscious celebrities to green lifestyle tips and the latest scientific findings and expert analysis," a release from the company explained, hinting that we will likely see photos of Leonardo DiCaprio with his shirt off in addition to the latest grim findings on climate change. "The section will also feature advice on sustainable investing and highlight eco-friendly businesses and sustainable business sectors such as renewable energy, green building, recycling and organics."

The new section of the site is set to launch June 4. Huffington Post representatives said the effort was spearheaded by current Editor-at-large Willow Bay, a TV journalist who currently hosts programs on the Lifetime women's cable network.

What's the hottest way to save face in today's eco-conscious, Jolie-Pitt-and-Project-Red world? Donate to charity, of course.

The Huffington Post, the online news outlet founded in 2005 by pundit Arianna Huffington and AOL veteran Ken Lerer, has managed to tick some people off because the site doesn't pay its army of bloggers. Since then, the company has attempted to justify that stance as accusations of greed and poor ethics (and of course the term "sweatshop") have been thrown rather liberally around the blogosphere.

"Think about the bloggers as op-ed page writers," Huffington said in an interview with Portfolio.com. "No one writes an op-ed for The New York Times for the money. They're writing because they want their views out there."

Problem is, the op-ed page of the Times is just one sliver of the newspaper, whereas a huge portion of the Huffington Post's revenue comes from ads running on those unpaid bloggers' posts--as well as on aggregated content from other news outlets. The "unpaid bloggers as op-ed contributors" argument just doesn't float that well.

So what's a left-leaning new-media mogul to do?

"We are looking at a model which would allow contributions to be made to a blogger's favorite charities," Huffington explained in the Portfolio interview. That would consequently keep the payroll small but prevent the company from looking, well, greedy. "Our bloggers would choose a number of charities, and we're working out a revenue model which would allow money to be sent to those charities."

Oh, snap. Brangelina would be so proud.