EXCLUSIVE

A key hire at Arianna‘s Huffington Post will be announced later today: Journalist and political veteran Frank Wilkinson will join HuffPo as blog editor. Wilkinson will be charged with integrating its bloggy news format to expand into new verticals (politics, media, business, entertainment and something called “Living Now”) as well as ramp up original political reporting alongside political editor Thomas Edsall.

Wilkinson is a former senior editor and national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone, where he won an Ellie in the “Public Interest” category, and was an original staff writer at the New York Observer.

HuffPo is clearly gearing up for 2008. The site already announced a “crowdsourcing” partnership with Jay Rosen‘s newassignment.net — deploying hundreds of “citizen journalists” to report and blog on the races. And HuffPo will host the first ever online presidential debate later this year.