Here’s what she had to say in a blog post this morning:

This is the first time we’ll have two HuffPost editions in the same country. But it won’t be a sibling rivalry; it will be a powerful collaboration, a reflection of our commitment to being a hub of reporting, comprehensive curation, group blogging and engagement across all of Canada. And since it’s part of HuffPost’s DNA to foster community — and also because it just makes a lot of sense — Le Huffington Post Québec’s editors will work closely with Le Huffington Post France to bring Quebecers the most relevant news and opinion from France, and vice versa.

Le Huffington Post France launched late last month, as Huffington said that she wanted to launch it at a “crucial time in France’s and Europe’s history.” Le Huffington Post France’s editorial director is Anne Sinclair, who is married to former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Le Huffington Post Québec’s managing editor is Patrick White, a Québec native with 20+ years of experience in the business. Radio-Canada’s Jean-Phillipe Cipriani is joining as the news editor. The blog editor is Tamy Emma Pepin, formerly part of Le Journal de Montreal, Québec’s biggest tabloid.

Huffington is emphasizing that Le Huffington Post Québec will really be all about Québec, and everyone associated has deep ties to the community. “We’ll cover everything that makes Québec unique, from its French-speaking heritage and stunning architecture to its politics and vibrant entertainment scene,” she says.

According to previous reports, Huffington Post is also set to launch the Huffington Post Streaming Network this summer. It will structure itself in a way similar to cable news networks and provide real-time news, commentary, and discussion.

This video was posted on January 18. By the next morning, it had gone viral. The video was posted on Huffington Post, and shown on “Good Morning America”, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live”.

As cynical as one can get about the world, often it’s babies and kittens that make the Internet run.

According to Forbes, the new channel will be called the Huffington Post Streaming Network and will kick off with a preview held in AOL’s HQ in New York City on February 2nd.

The new network will structure itself like cable news networks and provide real-time news and discussion. This means that Huffington Post reporters and editors will appear on camera to discuss events as they happen throughout the day. The channel is also prepared to feature on-air editorial meetings and social media integration, to give viewers an up close and personal look into how the news passes through HuffPo and out to consumers.

It’s not going to be a 24-hour news network, according to the sources. Live footage will be cut and re-broadcast to fill some time. But apparently the new HPSN will have more live coverage than competitors like the New York Time and the Wall Street Journal have with their streaming web programming.

To advertisers, video content is becoming a key priority, and that’s the big motivation behind this move. Huffington Post’s newsroom sports over 300 members, so the new project is most definitely feasible.

Can Huffington Post leverage this new channel to compete with traditional cable news outlets? Let us know in the comments.

Actually, Arrington continues to spread some juicy gossip about what’s going on with AOL. On his Uncrunched blog, he says that rumor has it that Aol is looking for a new president for its Huffington Post Media Group.

“The executive will report to Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, apparently, not Huffington,” he writes. “Currently Arianna Huffington runs both the business and editorial sides of the group. Running a business is fairly new to her. Before the Aol Acquisition Eric Hippeau was the CEO, but he resigned just before the Aol deal was closed.”

“By far the most interesting part of all this, though, is it’s not clear that Arianna Huffington is aware that the new position will report to Tim Armstrong, not Huffington,” he says. “Whatever happens, I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting my old job back.”

There have been some notable departures from Mashable as well, including Editor Ben Parr, who announced his transition just a few weeks ago.

There have been plenty of other changes throughout the industry over the course of the year, but these have been some of the more publicized.

Now, it’s ReadWriteWeb that’s going through some changes. Last month, arguably the blog’s most recognizable author Marshall Kirkpatrick announced that he’d be stepping away from his full-time gig at ReadWriteWeb, though he’ll still be contributing.

Today, news comes from ReadWriteWeb itself that it is being acquired by Say Media. RWW founder Richard MacManus writes:

I’m thrilled to announce that ReadWriteWeb has been acquired by SAY Media, a digital publishing company headquartered in San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb will anchor SAY Media’s growing Technology channel, which reaches more than 75 million global consumers each month.

ReadWriteWeb is going to get bigger and even better. Our plans include widening ReadWriteWeb’s editorial scope and expanding our team. That starts from today, with the addition of SplatF’s Dan Frommer to our team as an editor-at-large. We will also be doing a re-design, utilizing the sophisticated designers at SAY Media. With SAY’s technology and services, we’ll be able to scale ReadWriteWeb in ways previously unavailable to us. So I’m very excited about our team joining SAY Media. We’re going to take ReadWriteWeb to the next level!

Frommer tweeted:

MacManus and Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez put together this video:

“As part of SAY Media’s portfolio of owned and operated media properties,ReadWriteWeb will take advantage of the company’s proprietary technology platform, experienced ad sales team, and world-class design expertise to scale its business to reach more technology enthusiasts and decision-makers,” the company says in its press release. “Under SAY’s guidance, the site will continue to evolve through design and user experience innovations that align with SAY’s Clean Campaign vision, and also expand its editorial scope to appeal to a wider array of technology consumers.”

Say Media’s other tech properties include: Android and Me, Gear Patrol, gdgt, SplatF and TechDirt.

Say Media, which gets about 650,000 uniques per month in the U.S. (Quantcast), is looking to go public. Sanchez is quoted as saying, “Next year’s about how do we get ready to go public.”

According to TechCrunch, Say Media paid $5 million for ReadWriteWeb.

Do you think a publication should charge others to link to their content? Let us know in the comments.

Central European News (CEN) is a media organization that provides various services like news, images, research, and more to various media outlets, for money.

PressGazette’s Andrew Pugh ran an interesting story about the Huffington Post linking to sources like The Daily Mail, which had paid for content from CEN. CEN decided to send payment invoices to The Huffington Post, and the Huffington Post paid them. So then, CEN encouraged other content providers to follow their lead, and send the Huffington Post invoices as well. The thinking here is that other publications would be compensated for The Huffington Post linking to them.

Interesting position, but as it turns out, the Huffington Post didn’t mean to pay, as was revealed in an update to Pugh’s original post. They use CEN as one of their photo providers, and do pay for those services, and mistook these invoices as being related to that. So anyone who wishes to bill the Huffington Post for linking to their content might think twice about the probability that they’ll actually receive payment.

The real question here is: should The Huffington Post (or any site/blog) have to pay an original content creator to link to their content? Now, keep in mind: The Huffington Post LINKED to that content. It did not publish that content. It’s a link, referencing the content, not a copy of the full article.

According to the logic expressed by CEN, as conveyed in Pugh’s piece, it’s a violation of copyright if a publication even uses the original content as a starting point. So, by this logic, for example, if Publication A was the first to report on the death of Gaddafi, it would be a violation for publications B, C, D, E, and F, to report that Publication A was in fact reporting this news. Publication B could not say, “Publication A is reporting that Gaddafi is dead, but we have yet to confirm this.”

So, if one publication was able to get a source of their own with that information, but nobody else was able to, publications B, C, D, E, F, etc. would not even be able to mention that one publication was reporting on the death. The world would have to already be reading publication A to even know about the death, or at least reading publication G, H, I, J or K, which are paying Publication A for the rights to reprint.

Nevermind that it’s entirely possible that Publication A is not even a service that charges publications for reprints, because it’s entirely possible that publication A could be just a blog, or even somebody’s Google+ account. News is not only reported by traditional means anymore. That’s just the way it is.

Let’s look at one of the Huffington Post examples referenced in Pugh’s piece:

You can see that while the piece is not an incredibly lengthy, in depth piece, it does link to five different pages to pull together its story. This is in and of itself an indication that the piece is not a total rewrite of one article, but is drawing on references from various sources (including the Huffington Post’s own content). If you actually click through to those other articles, you can also see that this is not a straight re-write of any one piece.

As often as the law (as least in this country) has ruled on the side of fair use, I have a hard time believing Huffington Post would be legally in the wrong here, though I am not a lawyer by any means, and CEN is obviously not based in the U.S.

It seems like CEN wants people to pay to link to their content, but if you’re paying, why wouldn’t you just post the whole article. Impeding linking would be a dangerous precedent to set on the web. If sites are required to pay every time they want to reference a piece of information, it’s bound to not only create more situations where content providers just go uncredited, but it’s also likely to stifle a lot of valuable content from being created in the first place.

If one publication has information that is indeed new, or shares some insight that has not been expressed previously, but only makes sense in the context of another piece of information that has already been published by a different publication, they need to reference that piece. It simply doesn’t make sense to have to pay to point to freely available information, in my opinion. Feel free to disagree. That’s the way the web works. The web is based on links. Without links, it’s not a web.

While the HuffPost piece in question may not be some hugely important piece of content, who decides where the line is?

Where do you think the line is? Tell us what you think.

Dumenco explains that the article was a hit, but got way more traffic from Techmeme than from the HuffPost piece. Why is it ok for Techmeme to link to it and not for the HuffPost? According to Dumenco, because Techmeme takes a minimalist approach – normally with just a headline and short snippet (a la Google News) as opposed this particular HuffPost case, where the article was essentially rewritten, extracting all of the necessary points form the original piece.

“Techmeme drove 746 page views to our original item. HuffPo — which of course is vastly bigger than Techmeme — drove 57 page views,” says Dumenco.

In an update to the post, Dumenco shares an email from Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, which calls his criticism “completely valid.”

“We should have taken what you call ‘the minimalist approach’ or simply linked directly to your story. That is how we train our writers and editors to handle stories such as this,” it said, also adding that what occurred was “entirely unacceptable”. It also said that the complaint has led to greater, yet unspecified efforts to ensure reporters and editors understand that this is “unambiguously unacceptable.”

It’s frequently debated just what should be considered fair use. Righthaven has made a practice out of suing those it deems violators as a business model. Judges have been ruling on the side of fair use.

You have to bring something new to the table, or have some kind of added value if you’re going to base a post on the work of others. An aggregator like Techmeme or Google News gives you just enough for you to see whether or not you want to read the story. They don’t aim to be the source of information as much as the sign pointing you to that source. When you get into articles themselves, it becomes a different matter.

That’s not to say it’s wrong to quote from original sources. Links and credit are obviously musts, and you should simply bring more and/or different information or commentary to the story than what was in the original source.

Staci Kramer at Paid Content writes, “If you can’t manage the art of aggregation, stick to the science. Aggregation has been part of our coverage mix at paidContent from the beginning. Done right, it’s a valuable tool that helps readers and benefits the original source. Done wrong, it’s at best, a mess and at worst, theft.”

Here, for example, I’ve quoted from two different stories: the original AdAge piece and a PaidContent piece discussing it further. The PaidContent piece quoted from the original as well. Are either of us in the wrong for quoting (and linking to) these sources? I don’t think so, but you also don’t see us taking the entire post, paraphrasing, throwing a link on, and not adding anything to the conversation.

And that’s just it. Conversation. That’s why, in my opinion, it’s not only fair, but critical for publications to quote and link to original reports sometimes. The conversation shouldn’t end with the one report from the one source. There are often new shades of perspective or simply different angles to stories, and that is precisely what makes aggregators like Techmeme or Google News useful to the news consumer. They cluster these different articles on the same topics together to give readers a more rounded spectrum of coverage.

In this age of social media, things get even more complex. People are going to share stories through social networking channels. They’re going to add their own commentary most of the time, but at the same time there are plenty of people out there simply spouting off something they read in an article to their own circle of friends, or even to the public with no link or mention of the original source. That may be limited to 140 characters on Twitter, but it could be as long as an article on Facebook or Google+.

Publications have their work cut out for them if they’re to stop this kind of thing entirely.

The Canadian version of the hugely popular Huffington Post, will feature a mix of original reporting and aggregation, much like the American version. Arianna Huffington said, “When we announced our merger with AOL, I said that one of the things that most excited me about the deal was how it would allow us to reach our goals — including the launch of international editions of HuffPost — much, much faster.”

“Three months later, a key one of those goals is being realized with the launch of our first international version, HuffPost Canada. Canadians are no strangers to The Huffington Post: 1.5 million of them visited us in March,” she added, citing comScore data. “So starting our international expansion north of the border was a natural. I can’t wait to watch our talented HuffPost Canada edit team bring our real-time ‘digital water cooler’ to Canadians — and Americans looking to get some insight into our neighbours to the north.”

The relaunch of AOL TV comes with a strategic partnership with i.TV which provides mobile apps catering to TV-based engagement. “We are thrilled to welcome AOL TV to the i.TV platform,” said Brad Pelo, i.TV’s CEO. “Both companies bring unique and powerful capabilities to this partnership, which will revolutionize how millions of TV viewers discover, share and watch television.”

The relaunch puts AOL TV under a new AOLTV.com brand, which includes rich interactive listings, expanded video integrations, and new branded apps for the iPhone and iPad. Users will be able to use social check-ins, personalized channel lists, DVR scheduling, and a calendar.

While the announcement doesn’t make any mention of expansion beyond these three industries, it would only make sense. The company already has strong footholds in a variety of sectors with sites like The Huffington Post, Engadget, AOL Autos, etc.

It does say, “AOL Industry will offer subject-specific news, information, tools, video and analysis, and foster niche communities that enable professionals, experts and government employees to engage each other.”

The new initiative makes interesting use of LinkedIn. Users can use the social network integration to see personal connections to people and companies that are making news in a particular industry.

“Launching AOL Industry allows us to bring to specific business sectors the same sense of community for which AOL Huffington Post Media Group consumer sites are well-known,” said President of the recently formed AOL Huffington Post Media Group, Arianna Huffington. “We’re applying a blend of news, opinion and engagement to industries that have their own unique audiences, and creating a forum for influencers to connect and communicate with one another. We’re excited to launch AOL Energy today and see the site as an original offering for decision-makers and experts looking to keep up with a fascinating, fast-moving and complex field.”

The AOL Industry unit is being led by VP and General Manager Jay Kirsch. He says, “We believe there’s a great opportunity in creating targeted platforms by and for influencers in distinct industries and government. These sites will combine the best of news and information with the social, visual and personal aspects of today’s web. In fast-moving, specialized industries, decision-makers need an easy to use, authoritative source to stay on top of the news and to connect with one another.”

Naturally, the whole thing creates some new advertising opportunities for the company. “This is not only an incredible opportunity for industry experts and thought-leaders to take advantage of a unique platform, but it’s also a new way for advertisers to connect directly with executives and influencers in these sectors,” said AOL Advertising President Jeff Levick.

AOL Energy is up and running, while AOL Defense and AOL Government will be “launching soon”. Peter Gardett, Colin Clark, and Wyatt Kash (respectively) have been appointed as editors.

The class action complaint can be read in its entirety here (pdf).

The Huffington Post had put out the following statement:

The lawsuit is wholly without merit. As we’ve said before, our bloggers use our platform — as well as other unpaid group blogs across the web — to connect and help their work be seen by as many people as possible. It’s the same reason people go on TV shows: to promote their views and ideas. HuffPost bloggers can cross-post their work on other sites, including their own. Aside from our group blog, to which thousands of people from around the world contribute, we operate a journalistic enterprise with hundreds of paid staff editors, writers, and reporters.

Now Arianna Huffington herself has written a post about the suit, saying, “I am hesitant to take any time away from aggregating adorable kitten videos to respond….But the suit touches on so many important issues about the current state of the media, the kittens will have to wait.”

“According to legal blogger and UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh, ‘Tasini’s claim is a loser,’” she goes on to say. “Slate’s Jack Shafer, decrying ‘that we’re becoming a nation of Winklevosses who file legal motion after legal motion every time a pot of money is spotted,’ describes the lawsuit as ‘bunk’ and ‘full of beans’ and quotes Tasini’s own lawyer, conceding that there really is no there there: ‘The legal theory we’re going on is based in common law. This is not a statutory claim. … This is not a contract claim.’”

“That’s because no contract was broken,” she adds.

It’s worth noting that, as The Huffington Post has also pointed out numerous times, the contributed content is only part of the publication’s offerings. They run paid-for AP and Reuters content and have staff writers on hand.

A great deal of the criticism has been coming from writers angry about not getting paid for content that that they apparently contributed for free to the site. It’s a pretty common place on the web. Writers want exposure, so they submit articles – not for payment, but for links and/or recognition. This is by no means exclusive to the Huffington Post.

However, The Huffington Post has probably been the the most successful example of a site raking in the traffic and revenue while engaging in this kind of publishing – not that this is the only content that makes up the Huffington Post’s offerings.

Either way, The Huffington Post and AOL are now the target of a class action lawsuits from disgruntled writers who contributed content for free, but now want money for it. the effort is being led by labor activist Jonathan Tasini, according to a report from Forbes, who obtained the following statement from the Huffington Post:

The lawsuit is wholly without merit. As we’ve said before, our bloggers use our platform — as well as other unpaid group blogs across the web — to connect and help their work be seen by as many people as possible. It’s the same reason people go on TV shows: to promote their views and ideas. HuffPost bloggers can cross-post their work on other sites, including their own. Aside from our group blog, to which thousands of people from around the world contribute, we operate a journalistic enterprise with hundreds of paid staff editors, writers, and reporters.

It’s true, they’ve pretty much said that before numerous times. We recently looked at a Huffington Post staff writer’s response to the criticisms on which this suit is based.

The class action complaint can be read in its entirety here (pdf).

I’m no lawyer, but the gist, from what I can tell, is that the Huffington Post has made a ton of money off of the free articles these writers have contributed, and even though nobody forced them to give their work to the publication for free, they feel they are owed money because of said success.

It’s worth noting that, as The Huffington Post has also pointed out numerous times, the contributed content is only part of the publication’s offerings. They run paid-for AP and Reuters content and have staff writers on hand.

In fact, they’ve irritated a lot of non-journalist freelancers as they look to hire those with journalism credentials and stopping the payment of those without, meaning they would have to contribute these free articles if they hoped to get published on the publication (or come back when they have the credentials).