By pointing off, they are also automatically increasing the reach and relevance of their site. If they’re scraping the local news generators plus allowing comments plus pulling in the best local bloggers, why should someone go to the local newspaper’s website when it offers so much less.

For newspapers, this is not a drill.

Backfence was a drill. And, although they’re still around, Topix, YourStreet and Outside.in don’t present the kind of threat to newspapers that Arianna does.

Ask a random sample of folks if they’ve heard of any of the above. I’d wager a couple of beers that no one outside of the newspaper industry has a clue who they are.

Ask a random sample of folks if they have heard of the Huffington Post. Between three and seven million people go there every month, depending on which measurement you believe.

This could be the Craig’s List of editorial.

But it’s not too late. Newspapers can still beat her to the punch by inviting the best local bloggers into their tent (both the website AND the newspaper). And not in just an index, but incorporate them in the sections they’re writing about.

Newspapers have a HUGE advantage over Arianna. They distribute tens or even hundreds of thousands of what are, in effect, promotional fliers for their websites and the content therein. She has nothing like that.

I write more about this on my blog.

— John Wilpers

Don’t ponder. My email addresses/tags tend to have more than 12 letters.

Obviously she’s interesting but I don’t bother if Charlie Rose will interview her about how important she is every so often anyhow Charlie.is a new guy and a good interviewer of sorts but he’s a cheerleader on his own show.

It’s kind of like TV for me now. Pick a few things to see and maybe comment to anddon’t waste too much of the day. My bookmarks have been lost so many times anyway. I know where to find them usually.

If HuffPo has separate sites for each city, I suspect they could be popular. A lot of local news sites have little understanding of story selection for the web, and have sub-optimal layouts. The fact that HuffPo will link to stories from a variety of sources gives them better content right off the bat, too. But if by “sites” they just mean more sections, it could be another story. Requiring people to customize the site for their city, keep a cookie, or select from a drop-down list each time could seriously hurt traffic.