Hmm…interesting. So today we had that study that showed that most of the featured writers drawn on by Huffington Post are male, and a disproportionate number of the ones written by women were actually written by site owner Arianna herself. Meaning that only a small percentage of women get the top-trafficked hits on Huffington Post.

So with all that gender imbalance in the Op-Ed blog, why is Huffpost getting more traffic than ever?

The Huffington Post had the most unique readers among all outlets on a list of top 30 news destinations in October, in the latest monthly data from Nielsen Online. The site grew its uniques year-over-year by a whopping 448% to 8.1 million, and jumped to #18 on the list of top news sites from #20 last month. It had 7.4 million uniques in September.

Not that this necessarily has anything to do with the gender of their writers. It isn't as if Huffington Post used to be written by all women and now that it's all guys the traffic has sky-rocketed.

But the point is here is that Arianna is straddling a very fine line between controlling the news cycle and reporting it, much the way Matt Drudge was circa 2004, let's say. And in order to continue relevance, she must, as I posited earlier, make concessions to the way traditional journalism works, even if that means promoting a subtle kind of sexism towards her own gender.