Kim Bhasin is joining Huffington Post Business as a senior reporter. He comes to the site from Business Insider, where he had worked for the past two years.

According to a memo from Peter Goodman, HuffPost’s executive business editor, at HuffPost Bhasin will be focusing on retail and the food industry.

Goodman’s full note is below.

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Peter Goodman, who was hired away from The New York Times last year, is going to do more reporting and writing from now on. Goodman, The Huffington Post’s Executive Business Editor, announced the change in a memo this morning. Goodman said that the change had been planned since the beginning.

“I was brought in here to have an overall imprint on the business, economic and tech coverage, but not to manage the site in a granular way,” Goodman told Capital New York. “That’s something I’ve been doing, but now that we have the infrastructure in place, it’s a good time for me to hand off the day-to-day supervision to capable hands and go out and start writing and reporting more.”

Goodman will now be writing a weekly column, which will feature investigative pieces with a focus on middle class America.

Emily Peck, a writer for the Wall Street Journal since 2007, is leaving to become Managing Editor of AOL/The Huffington Post’s Money and Finance section. She was most recently Management and Careers Editor for the Journal. At her new position, Peck will oversee Daily Finance, Real Estate and Jobs operations.

Via a memo obtained by Poynter, Peter Goodman said that Peck will boost the already successful verticals. “Emily’s hiring represents our commitment to continue elevating and expanding these three vital, high-traffic sites that collectively help our readers unravel the real life issues of home, job and money,” said Goodman.

The AOL Huffington Post Media Group has expanded yet again this morning, this time launching Huffington Post Small Business. As you can tell by the name, the site hopes to offer readers analysis of the many issues facing small business owners. Rod Kurtz is the site’s Executive Editor.

Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, said that the new site is filling a void.

“Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and the key source of job growth,” explained Goodman. “Our site aims to crystallize a crucial conversation about what they need to prosper. We will spotlight what is working and amplify concerns about what is impeding the growth so sorely needed.”

Stay tuned for tomorrow when HuffPost launches HuffPost Wings, which will detail every aspect of the show “Wings.” Then next Tuesday, HuffPost is expected to launch HuffPost Kid Rock, a site dedicated to explaining how the Detroit native got people to purchase his music.

There’s more HuffPost sites coming, but that’s all we have confirmed for now.

UPDATE: Apparently this isn’t exactly something new. Jeff Bercovici of Forbes just tweeted to us that there was already a HuffPost small business site, and then Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic Wire said that he helped launch a small business subsection for HuffPost last year. You’d think HuffPost would mention these details, but alas.

Earlier today, we aggregated curated an Ad Age post by Simon Dumenco, where he described how Huffington Post’s aggregation of his article gave it only a meager bump in traffic, calling into question HuffPo’s rationale that aggregation drives major traffic to smaller sites. FishbowlNY itself noted that HuffPo’s aggregated version of Dumenco’s piece was around 250 words long — and the original article was about 676 words — so we weren’t surprised that HuffPo’s near full-on rewriting enticed only a few to check out the original piece.

HuffPo took notice. Poynter has posted an email to Dumenco from HuffPo Executive Business Editor Peter Goodman, in which Goodman apologizes for this “unacceptable” occurrence (great!) and adds that “the writer of the offending post has been suspended indefinitely” (what?!) The full email is below the jump.

This has struck some as an extreme, even aggravating reaction. For one, many who might want to speak publicly about their experiences with HuffPo may now prefer to hold back out of fear of getting a writer — who seems to have just been doing her  job — fired.  Choire Sicha writes at The Awl, “This is along the lines of arresting hookers instead of johns, or drug users instead of drug importers, or something.” He goes on to write:

The writer, who seems to be Yale class of (something fairly recent), Amy Lee, was doing pretty much what she’d been trained to do, either overtly or covertly, and she took the fall for the HuffPo, which is so obviously baloney… So the Huffington Post thinks it gets off clean from these entrenched practices by temporarily canning a smart young person who’s doing one of their terrible jobs as a way to get into writing and as a way to pay bills. It shouldn’t.

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It’s not just The Daily that has been bleeding talent as of late. The New York Times has itself withstood a series of unexpected departures over the past year, notably to the Huffington Post, which swallowed up “Sunday Business” editor Tim O’Brien as well as business reporter Peter Goodman. New York magazine also had an unexpected coup by taking on Times columnist Frank Rich. So one of new Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson‘s goals, she tells Gabriel Sherman at New York, is to put an end to all the defections, a surprising problem for the storied paper.

“Retention is becoming a challenge,” she said. “The economy has improved, whether it’s Bloomberg or the Huffington Post, I can feel on any given week that I’m playing whack-a-mole keeping our most talented people.”

Perhaps the Times will take a page out of Arianna Huffington‘s book and add a nap room in for the staff. It certainly can’t hurt.

After letting go most of AOL’s Daily Finance’s freelancers, AOL-Huffington Post has hired a whole new editorial team.  Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor, announced the major new hires today via press release. “Our audience can look forward to an irreverent, unpredictable and engaging take on personal finance,” said Goodman.

The new hires are Loren Berlin as Columnist, Ron Dicker as Celebrity Finance Writer, Alice Hines as Retail Reporter, Regina Lewis as Personal Finance Columnist, Eamon Murphy as Associate Editor, and Catherine New, Sheryl Nance Nash, and Bruce Watson as staff writers.

The good news: at least two of AOL Daily Finance’s nine editorial staffers will be former freelancers, according to paidContent. The site will also continue to feature the work of investing columnist Doug McIntyre, who seems to be one of the few to survive the site’s Huffington-ization.

On Monday, we relayed the Business Insider report that claimed AOL had fired its freelance business writers, then- because if someone is down it’s always a good idea to kick them – invited them to work for free.

Peter Goodman at AOL denied this report, but it looks like it was probably spot on, because freelancers at Moviefone/Cinematical got the same treatment. Here’s a snippet of an email sent by AOL to an ex-freelancer, which he tweeted yesterday:

That’s right. AOL values its freelancers, just not enough to pay them.

It’s a great time to be a writer!

UPDATE:
We received a copy of a follow-up to the above email, that, according to Mario Ruiz, Senior Vice President of Media Relations of The Huffington Post Media Group, corrected “errors.” The following is from Patricia Chui, Editor-in-Chief of Moviefone:

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The American Journalism Review talked to high profile reporters who left jobs at some of the most prestigious news outlets to work at The Huffington Post. What drew them in?

Total freedom, as Business Editor Peter Goodman, formerly of the New York Times, describes it. When Goodman was at the Times, for example, a front-page story on predatory for-profit colleges generated a lot of buzz, but the Times had no place for a follow-up. But, said Goodman: “Arianna’s whole thing is, ‘This is the Web, let’s hit it again and again. If we’ve got another one, let’s hit it again.’”

HuffPo National Editor Tim O’Brien, who had been Sunday business editor of the Times, likewise “saw a chance to build something from the ground up at The Huffington Post.”

The point is that more and more veteran reporters will opt for total freedom in their careers over having a job with the top brands in journalism. Good to know if you’re trying to hire the best in the business, but it remains to be seen whether or not this will lead to a successful news outlet in the long-term.

The Huffington Post Union of Bloggers, or HPUB, a non-profit corporation comprised of current and former bloggers and employees of the Huffington Post, has announced the launch of its website, www.hpub.org.

We learned a little more about HPUB through its facebook page, where it declares “Writers and bloggers of HP, past and present, paid and unpaid, satisfied and outraged, come and join us here.” From its description:

We didnt like HP’s slide to tabloid journalism and we dont approve of the AOL takeover. 9,000 bloggers didnt spend their time and effort building Huffpo’s content so that the website could be taken over by people with a very different agenda.

We took a look at the website, which has some global news-type stories along with manifestos like “We Are a Police State.” The featured article? “Why the Huffington Post ‘Fired’ Me.” It begins, compellingly:

Last Thursday, I was ‘fired’ as a labor blogger from the Huffington Post by executive business editor Peter Goodman for helping a group of union construction workers disrupt a conference of bankers. (I put fired in quotations marks because I, like the majority of people who blog for the site, was not paid for my contributions.)

Unfortunately, the HPUB site, according to its FAQ, is still ” working on a business model to pay contributors.” We wish it the best of luck.