Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them–as well as Hippeau–this afternoon.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the news site.

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BoomTown read a ton of the various columns reacting to the Associated Press’s announcement of a new initiative to–as near as I can tell–stop the Internet from being the Internet.

I tease, as it is a lot more complicated than that. But AP board Chairman and MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton seemed very exercised about his mission to “protect news content from misappropriation.”

It’s going to surely be an interesting debate, kicked off by a very curious quote Singleton gave to paidContent.org: “Print is still the meat. Online’s the salt and pepper.”

A tasty debate!

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The annual CTIA conference–CTIA reps the wireless industry–opens today in San Francisco, but the action started last night with some parties.
One was thrown by ContentNext Media, the online news site whose flagship paidContent.org writes all about online media, where I talked to Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali about big trends in cellphones.
He was spot on. [...]

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