Today on the Menu: FacePo, A President’s Lament, Mediaite’s First 43 Days

Colby Hall, managing editor of the 6-week-old media-news site Mediaite was our guest this morning. He helped Jason and me dissect this weekend’s top media stories, like President Obama’s healthcare reform OpEd in the New York Times, which Hall says might hurt the movement’s chances with conservatives (simply because of where it was published).

And then we spoke about the mashup news of the day, FaceBook and HuffPo’s collaboration called HuffPo Social News. The tool “connects you with friends and the news.” Gimmick &#151 yes. The future &#151 who knows. Hall and I agree that for some a tool that allows news aggregation via social media is an interesting idea if it permits the user to cull more than just HuffPo’s content.

Hall later tells us that his site’s first 6 weeks have been proof positive; with 300,000 unique visitors in the first month and more than 1.2 million pageviews; a Tweet from the WhiteHouse was a nice nod, as were the many conversations online and off about the watchdog site. But will the site be as big as a Huffing Post?

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