“People within the media gossip world [may] want to put [Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown] at each other’s throats,” the New York Times reports (in an article that closes with a comment by Kurt Andersen likening the two women to “King Kong and Godzilla”) but the two women are actually quite close. Per a friend who knew the women back when:

“Tina and Arianna really came up together in the London of the 1970s, and theirs was a world of fun, of spas and dating and who said what about whom.”

And now?

After Tina Brown’s signature Talk Magazine closed in 2001, she reached out to an old friend for support: Arianna Huffington.

Together they traveled to Rancho La Puerta, a spa in Mexico, and in early morning hikes in the foothills of Mount Kuchumaa, the two discussed Ms. Brown’s future.

Also: “each has two children,” each dated older men, and each was invited aboard David Geffen’s yacht last summer.

And, oh yeah, each now runs a newsy web site, sites that are “profoundly different in ways that will help determine which one will survive” (Huffington’s Huffington Post is a “visceral and boisterous conversation” while Brown’s The Daily Beast is “more genteel and cultivated.”)

But, only one will survive.