Arianna Huffington on New York Times Paywall: More Like a 'Hedge Wall!'

The testiness between the Huffington Post and New York Times continued late this week with HuffPo/AOL chief Arianna Huffington taking a lunch speech as yet another opportunity to needle Times executive editor Bill Keller. To be fair, Keller started it, but at this point, it's the Times that'd be slumming by deigning to scuffle with an aggregating machine anyway, while Huffington wins headlines and actually some hearts (not to mention Times employees!) by standing up to the big Bill bully. In other words, any time HuffPo can be seen as the underdog -- whether they actually are or not -- Arianna is winning and so she'll continue to throw rocks at the journalistic thrown. So she did it again! More inside a Friday evening edition of Press Clips, our daily media column.

Dull-ish Darts: "The New York Times pay wall isn't working," Huffington said at a luncheon for Gilt Groupe, reports Women's Wear Daily's Amy Wicks. "It is so hedged and has so many exceptions that it should be called a hedge wall, not a pay wall." Burn? A little!

The Times' online traffic did drop 24% last month, the first with the paywall up, but the PR suits maintain that's ahead of projections.

Up and Out: Speaking of, Horacio Silva is out at the Times' fashion glossy T after almost a decade, and although he claims he's been plotting his escape for four years, finally choosing the paywall moment to bounce makes sense for an online director. This is getting to be kind of a lot of coincidences!

Meanwhile, at the Daily Beast and Newsweek hybrid, managing editor Brekke Fletcher is bailing for the Wall Street Journal's redesigned WSJ magazine. The good news in that building is that the new issue will have 32 ad pages, which is way more than six.

Gotcha!: Tech blog panel prank is pretty punk, pussy cat.

[jcoscarelli@villagevoice.com / @joecoscarelli]