As some of the unpaid help are beginning to figure out...
Yesterday's conservative morphs into tomorrow's liberal, but once the money starts rolling in becomes just as selfish, greedy and piggish as any bourgeois running dog capitalist exploiter.
Arianna Huffington: Liberal Icon and Hypocrite.
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As some of the unpaid help are beginning to figure out...
Yesterday's conservative morphs into tomorrow's liberal, but once the money starts rolling in becomes just as selfish, greedy and piggish as any bourgeois running dog capitalist exploiter.
Some of the unpaid help should have reviewed contracts and worked out compensation ahead of time. Why give up your writing for free? If they knowingly did that, then they ain't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
They gave their work for nothing thinking that the exposure would translate into something profitable. When that didn't pan out, it suddenly became exploitation.
Was there any discussion of remuneration on the back end? Did Huffington promise folks she's take care of them if "things worked out"? If not, then those contributors are pretty stupid to be complaining now.
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Meh. People let themselves get used, sure they made their own bed. But that doesn't mean the person doing the using is free from criticism, does it?
I've never liked Huffington, but rallying to the defense of folks who were not smart enough to arrange things to their benefit -- like being paid for work -- seems kind of a waste of energy in this circumstance.
Hell no, Arianna deserves to be criticized, but I believe in assessing blame as merited.
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I can't speak for NT, but I'm speaking strictly of Huffington and her hyprocrisy, here. And again, I think it's a more than fair position to yake.
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The proper assignation of blame is the most important thing we can do, both in in life and esp in relationships.
Uh yeah... somehow I don't believe Mrs. Torrance would see it that way. I would recommend that you reconsider such a stance given that understanding where blame lies only helps to address a problem... it doesn't solve it.
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Why? There have always been writers willing to trade compensation for the promise of wider exposure and always publishers happy to provide them that opportunity.
When I was starting out I wrote for nothing because I had no clips. Once I accumulated enough good ones I could start asking for and receive payment for my work. With bloggers, how do you make your site stand out among the millions of blogs out there? A hot link on the HuffPo is probably a good way to spike the traffic numbers on your blog.
The trap is once you've established you'll give it away for nothing, it's really hard to demand payment when you are a blogger. I blog, but I don't look at blogging as something that is going to springboard me into a career for a mainstream media outlet.
Arianna Huffington build her media empire on free content. She never said she was going to pay her contributors. She's railed against corporations for years now. She's written books bemoaning the greed of big business (Pigs at the Trough) and the American middle class under siege (Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream).
Huffington made herself over from the trophy wife of a right-wing Republican bisexual to a born-again progressive icon. She was already rich. Now she's wealthy, but all that friend of the working class shit is out the window.
According to one member of the "Hey Arianna, Can You Spare A Dime" page on Facebook she coughed up $200,000 to send people to the Jon Stewart rally last year, but not one nickel for her bloggers.
It's not absurd to rake Huffington over the coals for her disdain for the people who helped make her rich(er). It would only be absurd not to.
Fair enough... though disdain might be the wrong word. I think she showed a total disregard for the people and the principles that built up her franchise and sold everybody out.
I had always imagined that the town of Huffington must be one of those picturesque New England towns and that their newspaper had been an early adopter of the internet. Now I know better.
a) Michael Huffington wasn't really particularly right-wing, at least not compared to most of the candidates California Republicans have nominated over the last couple of decades.
b) "Puppet master" would be a better description than "trophy wife" for Arianna during the period. It was pretty clear to observers that she was orchestrating Michael's political ambitions.
That's not much of a comparison. After decades in the minority, California Republicans are kerr-RAZY!
Chris Hedges Skewers Huffington's Hypocrisy:
The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism. The Huffington Post, as Stephen Colbert pointed out when he stole the entire content of The Huffington Post and rechristened it The Colbuffington Re-post, produces little itself. The highly successful site, like most Internet sites, is largely pirated from other sources, especially traditional news organizations, or is the product of unpaid writers who are rechristened “citizen journalists.” It is driven by the celebrity gossip that dominates cheap tabloids, with one or two stories that come from The New York Times or one of the wire services to give it a veneer of journalistic integrity. Hollywood celebrities, or at least their publicists, write windy and vapid commentaries. And this, I fear, is what news is going to look like in the future. The daily reporting and monitoring of city halls, courts, neighborhoods and government, along with investigations into corporate fraud and abuse, will be replaced by sensational garbage and Web packages that are made to look like news but contain little real news.
Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about. It was bad enough that Huffington used her site for flagrant self-promotion, although the cult of the self has reached such dizzying proportions in American society that such behavior is almost expected. But there is an even sadder irony that this was carried out in the name of journalism.
If Huffington has a conscience, she will sit down when the AOL check arrives and make sure every cent of it is paid out to those who worked free or at minimal wages for her over the last six years, starting with Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the “clinging to guns and religion” story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and spent two years writing and reporting without a salary.
“She strung me along for two years while I repeatedly asked for funding for three projects, and then I quit,” Fowler told me from Oakland, Calif., as I spoke with her by phone. When Fowler, whom the site nominated twice for a Pulitzer, finally resigned last year in disgust, Mario Ruiz, the spokesperson for The Huffington Post, acidly told Yahoo News: “Mayhill Fowler says that she is ‘resigning’ from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?”
That comment says it all. It exposes the callousness of our oligarchic class and their belief that they have a right to use anyone who can contribute to the monuments they spend their lives erecting to themselves.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/huffingtons_plunder_20110221/
Chris Hedges is right on point. Huffington is as much a friend to writers and bloggers as Gov. Walker is to organized labor.
The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism. The Huffington Post, as Stephen Colbert pointed out when he stole the entire content of The Huffington Post and rechristened it The Colbuffington Re-post, produces little itself. The highly successful site, like most Internet sites, is largely pirated from other sources, especially traditional news organizations, or is the product of unpaid writers who are rechristened “citizen journalists.” It is driven by the celebrity gossip that dominates cheap tabloids, with one or two stories that come from The New York Times or one of the wire services to give it a veneer of journalistic integrity. Hollywood celebrities, or at least their publicists, write windy and vapid commentaries. And this, I fear, is what news is going to look like in the future. The daily reporting and monitoring of city halls, courts, neighborhoods and government, along with investigations into corporate fraud and abuse, will be replaced by sensational garbage and Web packages that are made to look like news but contain little real news.
Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about. It was bad enough that Huffington used her site for flagrant self-promotion, although the cult of the self has reached such dizzying proportions in American society that such behavior is almost expected. But there is an even sadder irony that this was carried out in the name of journalism.
If Huffington has a conscience, she will sit down when the AOL check arrives and make sure every cent of it is paid out to those who worked free or at minimal wages for her over the last six years, starting with Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the “clinging to guns and religion” story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and spent two years writing and reporting without a salary.
“She strung me along for two years while I repeatedly asked for funding for three projects, and then I quit,” Fowler told me from Oakland, Calif., as I spoke with her by phone. When Fowler, whom the site nominated twice for a Pulitzer, finally resigned last year in disgust, Mario Ruiz, the spokesperson for The Huffington Post, acidly told Yahoo News: “Mayhill Fowler says that she is ‘resigning’ from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?”
That comment says it all. It exposes the callousness of our oligarchic class and their belief that they have a right to use anyone who can contribute to the monuments they spend their lives erecting to themselves.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/huffingtons_plunder_20110221/
Chris Hedges is right on point. Huffington is as much a friend to writers and bloggers as Gov. Walker is to organized labor.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said Thursday the company is cutting 200 jobs in the U.S. and 700 in India following its $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.
Armstrong, speaking at the Bloomberg Media Summit in New York City, lamented the cuts but said AOL (AOL) is "much more healthy" than it was a few years ago.
"From a portfolio perspective, you need to continue to invest in things that make you profitable," Armstrong said. He added that he would address his employees about the cuts after leaving the Media Summit.
AOL unloaded 40% of its cash on the Huffington Post purchase last month. As part of the deal, HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington became president and editor-in-chief of all HuffPo and AOL content.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/10/technology/aol_layoffs_armstrong/index.htm
Armstrong, speaking at the Bloomberg Media Summit in New York City, lamented the cuts but said AOL (AOL) is "much more healthy" than it was a few years ago.
"From a portfolio perspective, you need to continue to invest in things that make you profitable," Armstrong said. He added that he would address his employees about the cuts after leaving the Media Summit.
AOL unloaded 40% of its cash on the Huffington Post purchase last month. As part of the deal, HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington became president and editor-in-chief of all HuffPo and AOL content.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/10/technology/aol_layoffs_armstrong/index.htm
Actions (and acquisitions) have consequences.
Queen Arianna maximizing her opportunities has already had immediate and dire consequences. As part of AOL's acquisition of The Huffington Post, 200 staffers from their sites such as Politics Daily and Daily Finance saw their jobs terminated.
Queen Arianna maximizing her opportunities has already had immediate and dire consequences. As part of AOL's acquisition of The Huffington Post, 200 staffers from their sites such as Politics Daily and Daily Finance saw their jobs terminated.
Oh well, I'm sure they will be able to get jobs writing for The HuffPo for free. All they have to do is find another way to buy food, pay bills and afford the electricity for their laptops.
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Mac, I'm so happy you posted that, because I was coming here to do just that if it wasn't here. I'm in a very spirited debate on Twitter (as well as on the site that I work for) about the lawsuit. I'm sort of shocked that more writers aren't on the side of Tasini. Mind you, I think he's a famewh*** but I think this was a case of bait-and-switch. There's a huge difference, in my mind, between contributing content for a give-and-take situation in which I'd get increased traffic and notoriety while helping out a fledgling new media site, but I think the classy and ethical thing to do when you sell that site for $$ is to at least make some sort of token remuneration to the people who helped get you there.
Shoot, when Ev sold Blogger to Google, those of us who were using Blogger Pro (including Arianna, I might add) got free sweatshirts out of the deal. I think she could have done something for the writers on whose backs she made her money.
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