• ... Who says liberals are humorless? Well, lots of people. But that won't stop Arianna Huffington from getting into the comedy business with a new Web venture set to launch in November. Speaking to Radar at a party for her book, On Becoming Fearless, Saturday night, Huffington described the site as a vehicle for political satire with a quicker response time than Saturday Night Live or even The Daily Show.

Not that it's a competition, mind you: Huffington repeated her oft-voiced belief that the media world in the age of the Internet is not a zero-sum game—"and the print people who don't get that aren't going to survive." Scary media mogul Barry Diller gets it, evidently; though the new site will arguably compete with CollegeHumor.com, which he recently acquired a controlling share in, Diller is a partner in the venture. The site will be edited by Ben Wikler, a former Al Franken collaborator who has been working on Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown's campaign for Senate.

• ... There are embers of life yet in the smoking ruin that is Jared Paul Stern's journalistic career. The alleged Page Six extortionist (and onetime Radar contributor) has been hired as books editor of BlackBook magazine.

Steve Garbarino, BlackBook's new editor in chief, explains: "I'm using Jared as a freelancer to help assign out books for our One Night Stand department and to negotiate exclusives on non-fiction and photography books. It's purely functional: He has the connections and knows my tastes. So far, the publishing world doesn't seem to really care, and he has a lot of alliances with respectable novelists and journalists I'll be working with. He's not writing gossip, after all. Plus, I had to ask myself, 'What would Jesus do?'"