Paying bloggers is “not our financial model,” The Huffington Post’s co-founder Ken Lerer told USA Today. What a profitable business that must be.
The Huffington Post is a popular liberal blog site named for Arianna Huffington, a pundit and power broker in the celebrity-industrial complex. Huffington is also very smart. After all, she has 1,800 contributors typing their little fingers off for no money while sending the Web site’s ad revenue and $10 million in funding into other pockets.
The concept is ingenious: Huffington gives her Hollywood pals a stage on which to strut their political opinions. (Few newspapers care what Alec Baldwin thinks about Iran.) The armies of ordinary scriveners are paid in trickledown glamour. It’s “Blogging With the Stars.”
The Huffington Post is not exactly a charity. As Lerer said, “You can build a brand in a year or two — just look at MySpace and Facebook.” As we know, MySpace sold two years ago for $580 million, and Microsoft recently bought a tiny piece of Facebook for $250 million.
Speaking of which, about 1,500 Facebook users are now posting their own ads. That goes against Facebook policy. The social networking Web site says it doesn’t want the users’ profiles to look “cluttered,” but we know better. Facebook wants the ad revenues all for itself. It’s that great business model: The bloggers provide free content, and Facebook collects the mega-millions.
Like most political blogs, the “news” on The Huffington Post is merely links to newspapers, TV stations and other organizations that actually pay their creators. Without the serf-written blogs, the site would be worth next to zero.
Being very left-wing, The Huffington Post provides a daily damnation of top-hatted capitalists oppressing the toiling masses. Imagine obtaining such content from slave labor. Business schools will be studying this example for years.
I’m not making this up. Just as The Huffington Post expressed its resolve not to compensate writers, one of the bloggers posted an item headlined “Greed Is Good: How Big Media Wants To Steal From Its Workers.”
The unremunerated author was Jonathan Tasini, and the subject was the Hollywood writers strike. As Tasini bitterly put it, “(T)his fight is a classic example of unadulterated greed of the few trying to triumph over the very people who made the few (TV and movie studios) fabulously wealthy.”
The writers’ issue, by the way, is getting a cut of digital media revenues. And so here’s a blogger within the vitreous House of Huffington throwing such verbal stones as “Big Media argues that, poor souls that they are, it can’t afford to pay more because its business models for New Media are uncertain and it needs the increased revenues to offset ‘other costs.’”
According to his bio, Tasini was president of, of all things, the National Writers Union. And he is immensely proud of his successful U.S. Supreme Court case against The New York Times. The newspaper’s offense was not paying freelancers extra when it recycled their work in new media. At least the Times paid them once.
I also am not making this up: In a highly flattering interview with Arianna Huffington found on Wired.com, “journalist” David Weinberger notes the remarkable coincidence that “(he) actually posted (his) first post at Huffington Post about an hour ago.”
No problem, Huffington reassures him. “And since, of course, no money has passed hands, and you have not been paid anything, I think the conflict of interest is vastly diminished.” Ain’t new media grand?
The Writers Guild of America, which represents the Hollywood writers, wants to expand its ranks to include providers of original Internet content. What a capital idea. The pickets should have no trouble finding their next address.
Froma Harrop is a Providence Journal columnist. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com.
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