If the brave new world of media and journalism is online, then the Huffington Post is one of the few business models that seems to be working right now. Makes sense since, in the early days of the industrial revolution, the business models that worked took unfair advantage of workers just like HuffPo does.

Remember when capitalism thrived because companies kept employees sequestered in fire-trap sweatshops like the Triangle Factory, housed them in company towns where employees could take company wages to the company store and buy what they needed and if they couldn’t afford it right then, could even use company credit that they could pay back through wage garnishing. The company town/sweatshop for writers and journalists is virtual, but it’s just as dangerous.

HuffPo’s business model is simple: Give away the product for free, poach aggregate content for free, generate original content for free, sell ads for revenue, investors make millions. As I watch the media organizations great and small fail all around me, that model is really starting to chap my hide. Especially when Arianna Huffington is quoted as saying something as pompous as this:

“We have 200 new blog posts a day and about 2,500 bloggers with a password who can post any time day or night,” says Arianna Huffington, another founder and HuffPo’s public face. What she offers them is “a platform with millions of readers,” a “civil environment” maintained by moderators paid to purge the readers’ comments of vulgarity and stupidity, and the opportunity to write “whenever they have something to say, with no expectations of being paid.” This assures her that her writers are driven only by their big ideas. “Do you think,” she asks, “that someone doing an op-ed for the New York Times is doing it for the $100?”

(via Chicago Reader)

It’s true that if I had the opportunity to write an Op-Ed for The Times, the $100 would be just icing on the cake, but it would also be my due for helping (in a very small way) the publication generate revenue.  In Arianna’s world view though, free publicity on her site is payment enough.

You know what the problem with this world view is? It surmises that there are plenty of  avenues for writers to follow where they will get paid. But as sites see that aggregating content for free and not paying writers works, there are going to be less and less paying outlets where writers can earn a living. Sure, every last Tom, Dick, and Harry can publish a blog or even a book these days, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna get noticed and paid, even if you are a HuffPo blogger. After all, there are 2,500 of them.

The irony is that, as HuffPo admits, most of its bloggers are not full-time writers and are using the site for publicity anyway. But what kind of publicity can you get unless you’re a professional writer who is good enough to get noticed and pimped by the editors?

I get the HuffPo daily email and look at its headlines. I am a liberal after all and they make me feel good. On average though, I read very little on the site because most of it is drek. Even the highlighted articles chosen by editors are often poorly written, long-winded, masturbatory pieces. So while Arianna may think she is doing the world a service by giving us all a platform to spout off at 3 in the morning and increasing the prevlance of “citizen journalism” at the same time, she’s not. By making sure there is more out there to read, she is making sure less people will want to read it because the good stuff will be lost amidst all the chaffe and making sure those of us who do try to earn a living at this craft will no longer be able to.

If there’s always someone willing to do it for less, then why pay the guy who wants more for his services? Sound familiar?

The top image was taken from adrants.com and the second came from a long piece on the Triangle Fire by Mike Ely at his blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.