Idle Chatter: Ladies Who Launch, Pundit School...

-Arianna Huffington is totally fine with having Tina Brown as a competitor, really. But one person who's not fine with the whole thing is Barry Diller's head of web programming, who has already expressed concerns about how much The Daily Beast, Brown's IAC-backed news-and-culture website, is going to cost. [NYT]

-Speaking of Huffington, she says Huffington Post's traffic won't fall off after the election no matter which guy wins because her site represents the "new center." [Ad Age]

-The Newark-basked Star-Ledger is bidding goodbye to the 40 percent of its newsroom staff who have accepted buyouts. The steep cut was the only alternative to going out of business for the New Jersey paper. [WSJ]

-Ever wonder why all the "Republican strategists" and "Democratic consultants" whose blather provides so much of the filler on cable news all sound vaguely similar? It's because they get media trained at pundit schools, where they learn to suppress their own thoughts and speak in pre-fabricated sound bites. [NYT]

-Robb Report magazine is for sale; the asking price is supposedly over $100 million. [Folio]

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