June’s been a busy month for the folks over at The New Republic — within the past few weeks, they have launched four new blogs and has experienced much online growth. The four blogs, listed below, form just one aspect of TNR‘s ongoing online expansion:

• Citizen Cohn: Jonathan Cohn‘s blog health care blog, domestic policy and the political process.

• Entanglements: a foreign policy blog featuring reporting and analysis by the likes of Andrew Bacevich, David Rieff, David A. Bell, and editor Lawrence F. Kaplan.

• The In-House Critics: Michael Kazin and Jim Manzi, critics on the Left and the Right, respectively, work to keep TNR “intellectually honest.”

• Goal Post: a blog dedicated to smart soccer and geopolitical analysis of the World Cup

Additionally, TNR has experienced an increase in digital advertising revenue of 125 percent in the first half of this year over the first half of 2009. It has managed to increase traffic to its site by 45 percent, and has seen a 2x increase in online subscriptions.

Not a terribly shabby start to the summer.

As part of its ongoing endeavor to make itself over as a brand-management company, Playboy Enterprises has announced that it will be downsizing its operations. The purveyor of nude pictorals and the occasional probing celebrity interview is shedding an undisclosed number of staffers in an effort to achieve $3 million in annual cost savings.

In an announcement, Playboy CEO Scott Flanders said, “Our goal is to transition Playboy to a brand management company. … The downsizing announced today is not a reflection of our employees’ talents and work ethic, but rather due to the overall change in the company’s strategic direction.”

Flanders’ statement echoes a directional change hinted at in the company’s first-quarter earnings statement. At that time, Flanders indicated Playboy would be outsourcing operations and observed that the company’s licensing division was among its most profitable businesses.

(h/t minOnline)

ProPublica has unveiled a redesign of its website, complete with easy-to-navigate context for their ongoing investigative reports, improved search capabilities, and a new FAQ section which includes a helpful guide to pronouncing ProPublica. (Turns out: “Dimple.”)

The site, the result of much greasy elbowage on the part of ProPublica’s editor of news application Scott Klein and the ProPublic web team, also comes with a new tag for the ProPublica blog: “Muck It.”

In the words of ProPublica’s director of communications, Mike Webb: “Seriously, it’s better.”

Adds Klein:

With this redesign, we’ve tried to take everything we’ve learned, and everything we’ve added, and put it together into one nice, clean site. Our hope is that the level of design sophistication now matches the sophistication of our reporting.

Wired, whose initial foray into the iPad space met with about the most success of any magazine out there, is preparing to sell its next tablet edition for $3.99. That’s a full dollar — or for the mathematically inclined, 20% — off the inaugural iPad issue’s price of $4.99 (which is how much it costs on the newsstand).

But why bring down the price on a product that sells mightily already? Says Wired editor Chris Anderson to Peter Kafka at AllThingsDigital:

“I would say that right now, all of us have opinions about the perfect price,” he says. “My feeling, my own personal instinct, is that digital should be at slight discount to print.”

Anderson repeatedly told Kafka that he doesn’t set the price for Wired, but also said he would prefer that the iPad version reach a “freemium” price point — part of the content would be free, and the rest would cost extra.

Andrew Breitbart published a screed on Big Journalism asking for anyone who has access to the JournoList listserv archives to come forth and, as it were, prosper.

Here’s his perfectly decent proposal: Breitbart, itching madly to part with $100,000 that’s been “burning” in his pocket for the past three months, will award said amount to whomever is able and willing to provide him with the full JournoList archive. He vows to keep the seller’s identity completely secret.

JournoList, you’ll recall, is the listserv founded by Ezra Klein through which former Washington Post contributor Dave Weigel suggested the world is a better place with a flaming Matt Drudge.

Breitbart’s reasons? He hopes that airing out the gossip and grievances of the listserv’s 400 former users will act “in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex.” Breitbart’s take on the Weigel debacle is that other JournoList members, when they were not busy consuming the flesh of unborn children, deemed him “not liberal enough” for, at times, siding with conservatives on certain issues.

Further explanation of Breitbart’s proposal, via Breitbart.tv, after the jump.

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Vanity Fair has named Jessica Diehl as its new fashion director.

Diehl, who formerly served as the magazine’s contributing senior style editor, is taking over for Michael Roberts, who is staying on as style editor at large.

“While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.”

So writes Kathleen Parker, 2010 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, in today’s Washington Post, on why Barack Obama is America’s first woman president.

We’ll resist our testosterone-fueled urge to measure Parker’s understanding of gender against our own. Instead, for reasons requiring no elaboration, we’ll form a circle, out of our body, by curling up into a ball and weeping softly, drying our tears with crumpled Washington Post op-ed pages.

Slate business section The Big Money has launched a new blog, punnily titled “Re: Tweet,” all about Twitter. New York – based Big Money writer Steve Spillman is manning the project.

In an introductory post, Spillman says that the motivation for the blog is to explore the company’s transition from cultural powerhouse to a big business.

The first post takes Adrian Grenier, star of HBO’s “Entourage,” to task for his belief that Twitter can serve as an adequate surrogate publicist.

Adrian Grenier’s tweets, just by virtue of their existence, probably do help his image and exposure, but they’re no replacement for the hard work of being in show business.

Spillman tweets here (his bio reads, “Just a bro.”), and has fittingly announced the launch of Re: Tweet on Twitter. Sounds like a fun job!

Following its formation of a team of global managing editors to help ramp up news operations, Reuters parent Thomson Reuters has announced that two of its executives are assuming new roles to accommodate additional changes to the digital side of the business.

Alisa Bowen, who had previously been charged with redesigning Reuters.com and developing mobile apps, on Tuesday was made global head of business operations with an eye toward revamping the Reuters news agency. Bowen joined Reuters in 2001 as a business analyst for media strategy.

Meanwhile, former global editor of Thomson Reuters’ online projects Keith McAllister has been made editor and publisher of consumer media. Before joining Reuters in April 2009, McAllister was CEO of online syndicator Mochila. He has also worked for CNN, where he was senior executive in charge of newsgathering.

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