Welcome: Huffington Post Detroit and local editor Simone Landon

The words "Let's walk there" are like music to our ears. Simone Landon has just said it, and we're about to do it on a perfect, sunny November afternoon in Corktown.

New Model D publisher Claire Nelson and I are meeting with Landon, the new editor of Huffington Post Detroit, which launches this Thursday. Earlier, Issue Media Group founding partner Brian Boyle met with Landon at Astro Coffee, and we joined the caffeine party as Boyle exited. But it's too nice to stay indoors, even if indoors is this cozy Michigan Avenue storefront.

"Of course," we say. "Let's walk."

The destination is the new offices for HuffPost, inside the labyrinthine former Lincoln Brass Works Foundry on Rosa Parks, south of Michigan. We get the grand tour, up, down and into dark corridors that open up into potential work or performance spaces. Impressive and raw, just the way we like it. Take a look at this Dev News hit for what's in store, including Detroit Curbed (Hey, Model D Imported to Detroit contributor Sarah Cox). 

While we walk through this massive space and back out again into the neighborhood, Landon talks about growing up in Hubbard Farms and the Cass Corridor, the daughter of longtime Detroit food critic Jane Slaughter, how she attended Friends and Cranbrook schools before leaving the region to attend Brown University in Providence.

"I majored in Africana Studies and Latin American Studies and took a semester to travel by bus in Mexico and Central America," she says, later underscoring some of this history via email. She first caught the journalism bug as a copy editor at Cranbrook's Crane-Clarion. She wrote for Detroit-based Labor Notes, did some freelance work for the Metro Times and WDET, and was a producer for National Public Radio's Morning Edition at its Rhode Island affiliate.

"I spent a scant seven months in New York as a news editor for HuffPost before hightailing it out of Brooklyn and back to Detroit, where I always wanted to be in the first place," she says. Well done, Simone.

The Huffington Post, is a New York-based news site, aggregator and host to a number of opinionated bloggers. It was co-founded by Arianna Huffington in spring 2005. The site covers politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, green issues, LGBT issues and international news.

Three years ago, the site launched its first local version, HuffPost Chicago. The most recent edition is HuffPost San Francisco, which launched this summer. Miami joins Detroit for a late fall launch.

We'll be talking to Landon more as the site settles into the local media scene. And, we have a Q&A with Arianna Huffington planned for an upcoming issue. Welcome, fellow editors and publishers, welcome.

Managing editor Walter Wasacz is saying 'hello' and 'welcome' to many new faces lately.