The hypocrisy of HuffPo
A tip of the hat to Wil Wheaton, who calls out the Huffington Post for its abhorrent practice of paying nothing to most of its contributors (even though Arianna and her investors, et al, are scooping up millions). As Wheaton notes, “you can’t pay your rent with “the unique platform and reach our site provides.”
That’s only part of the point, though, the larger ones being that:
- Arianna Huffington has held herself out as some sort of exemplar of best practices, as a much-quoted “progressive” (including on the public radio show “Left, Right and Center,” where theoretically she represented “Left” — but she founded and heads a company that subverts the idea that artists should be paid; and
- They have the money;
- And if they think your work is good enough to drag enough eyeballs over — which will further benefit them monetarily, as they sell that traffic to advertisers — then it must be good enough to pay for
- And, finally, they are essentially selling your work and paying you nothing
Several friends of mine have gotten an email or a private Facebook message or occasionally even a public Facebook posting on this subject after I’ve seen them note how thrilled they are to have their writing appear (unpaid) in the HuffPo. Writing for the HuffPo is like prostituting yourself — except prostitutes get paid.