Finke moved Deadline Hollywood Daily, her one-woman operation, from LA Weekly to Penske’s burgeoning Web empire in June. At the time, she promised to hire a “senior” journalist, based in New York City, within three months.

Now Penske tells me that the new hire, whom he describes as a “well-known figure from established media,” has been locked up, is finishing paperwork, and will be on board within two weeks. Finke also promises to have hires in “London, Paris, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Sydney” within the next year.

Not that long ago, it would have been inconceivable to see a big-name media macher go to work for a one-woman blog owned by a white-label email services provider. But now that Web publishing has lost most (but not all) of its reputation as a backwater for second-raters, wannabes and has-beens, and now that traditional publishing is on life support, it’s a whole lot more believable.

So. Who’s making the leap and jumping into the digital pool with the rest of us? (It’s great fun! You’ll love it! Unless you hate it!) A few of us have been guessing at names for a bit, but there’s no reason to keep our parlor game to ourselves.

Feel free to speculate in comments below, though you’ll have to use your real name if you do. If you’re feeling shy, you can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. And if you want to be completely anonymous, which is understandable but less useful to me (I won’t have any way of reaching you for follow-up) you can use the blind tip box here.

This is now clockwork: Some kind of calamity happens somewhere. Shortly after, an Internet debate breaks out about who did a better job of breaking and/or covering the story–citizen journalists/bloggers or boring old mainstream media.

The new variation on an old theme: Does Twitter constitutes a “news” source?

If you want to read about that at length, be my guest–there’s plenty over at Techmeme. But Dave Winer has summed it up pretty well in a couple of words:

What you see on Twitter, when: 

1. People witness events that others are interested in; and 

2. They’re posting about it on Twitter; and 

3. The interested people are reading their posts… 

It certainly is news. Whether it’s journalism or not isn’t a very interesting discussion, to me. 

To the user, both extremes, Twitter and the most vetted pro news, require skepticism. The reader triangulates”

The Indian police, meanwhile, seemed to take Twitter seriously, at least according to the Times “Lede” blog, which reported that cops asked that both reporters and Tweeters “do not discuss their movements, because they are concerned that the terrorists in the Taj and Oberoi Hotels are watching television to monitor the situation.”

What I haven’t seen on the blogosphere–or any news outlet–is a reasoned and thoughtful discussion of why India is seemingly beset with terror attacks. But I don’t expect to read or hear that a day after a news event, in any medium, because that’s not fast-twitch material.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what actual Twitter users are actually saying about the Mumbai attacks, head over here (even though Twitter spent some $15 million buying a search engine, it makes its search function inexplicably hard to find).

From what I can see, at this point Twitter is basically a good place to find quick links to other people’s coverage of the event, but maybe I’m missing something. (Click on image to enlarge)

[Image Credit: Stuti, which seems to have lifted the image from NDTV India]