• by Tom Siebert , December 4, 2006

Journalism just got more political. For the second time in as many weeks, a popular print reporter covering politics has jumped to a virtually new address.

Online political news and celebrity gossip blog The Huffington Post, the left-leaning alternative to the right-wing Drudge Report, has hired Melinda Henneberger as political editor. A former reporter for The New York Times, Henneberger was a contributing editor to Newsweek on sabbatical, writing a book about women voters.

The site's founder and namesake, author and political provocateur Arianna Huffington, says Henneberger--whose debut column ran Saturday--is the first of several new hires, following August's infusion of $5 million in venture capital from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners.

"Melinda will have the purview to hire reporters to cover Congress and the '08 race in depth," Huffington says. "We will report from the campaign trail, include video, and make the site increasingly interactive."

Huffington says one goal for the site is to host an online debate between the presidential candidates in 2008, "so they don't both have to be in one place, and can take questions from the general populace." The site will also expand its coverage of women's issues and publish longer, in-depth investigative reporting pieces "with attitude," she says.

"We've gotten a lot of leads on stories we would have loved to chase, but didn't have the staff to follow up," Huffington says. "We want to be chasing stories like war profiteering, one of the greatest crimes of all time, where even people in favor of the war should be alarmed because so many companies are making unbelievable profits over the war."

The Huffington Post launched in May 2005, and currently gets about 2.5 million unique visitors a month. It also has advertisers, including JCPenney, Vonage, Netflix and DishTV.

The Henneberger hire comes on the heels of last week's announcement that two political reporters for The Washington Post, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, left the influential newspaper to join Allbritton Communications, where they will launch a Web-based multimedia news venture.