Posted on 03/19/2011 4:29:39 AM PDT by bronxville
A strike called by unpaid Huffington Post contributors received a major boost Wednesday with a call to arms released by the national Newspaper Guild.
The industry association called on contributors not currently on strike to cease contributions and asked members to help by “shining a light on the unprofessional and unethical practices of this company.”
The Newspaper Guild boasts 26,000 members and is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The CWA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
The strike was called earlier this year by the membership of Visual Art Source, whose 50 members had previously contributed content for free to the site.
“Just as we would ask writers to stand fast and not cross a physical picket line, we ask that they honor this electronic picket line,” wrote the Guild.
“This is about supporting the quality and integrity of a vehicle for progressive expression, to actually help Huffington Post succeed, but on the right terms,” wrote the Guild. “We call on Arianna Huffington to demonstrate her commitment to the working class she so ardently champions in her writing.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/17/newspaper-guild-huffington-post-strike/#ixzz1H2jFl41i
Seems to me there was some tremendous deceit on the part of Huffington to include the efforts of unsecured labor as an tangible asset of Huffpuffpost. Something tells me this isn’t going to end up quite the “payday” she imagined.
Yep. She sat back and made millions off the unpaid talents of others.
If no one “pays” for these reports, no one is held responsible for the content of these reports...
Garbage in, garbage out...
The Huffington Post way to “journalism”...
Just another AOL idiotic acquisition that will lead to massive losses...
Didn’t she already cash out? I am admittedly vague on the terms of her sale.
NY Times, Huffington Post exchange barbs
AFP - Bill Keller, executive editor of the venerable New York Times, and Arianna Huffington, founder of brash newcomer The Huffington Post, exchanged blows on Thursday in a highly public spat.
Keller threw the first punch in a column for the Times magazine, calling Huffington the “queen of aggregation” in a dig at her site’s practice of frequently linking to news items produced by other media outlets.
Huffington, he wrote, “has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your website and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.”
Aggregation, the Times editor said, too often “amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own website and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material.”
“In Somalia this would be called piracy,” he said. “In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.”
Keller went on to recount his appearance on a “Future of Journalism” panel with Huffington.
“I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented,” he said. “Afterward, we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter.
“A moment later, I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms Huffington,” Keller wrote. “I felt so... aggregated.”
Huffington slugged back in a blog post, accusing Keller of unleashing an “exceptionally misinformed attack” on The Huffington Post, which she sold to AOL last month for $315 million, that is “as lame as it is laughable.”
Searching for a motive, Keller, she said, is “perhaps unsettled by the fact that, when combined, The Huffington Post and AOL News have over 70 percent more unique visitors than The New York Times.”
Huffington dismissed the accusation that The Huffington Post thrives on content produced by other news organizations.
“Even before we merged with AOL, HuffPost had 148 full-time editors, writers and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism,” she said.
As for the panel incident, Huffington said she was not parroting Keller but was, in fact, repeating statements that she had made repeatedly and as many as three years earlier.
“So who was it, Bill, who was ‘aggregating’ someone else’s ideas?” she asked.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2687618/posts
The News Guild called the strike ‘early this year’ - a few days ago Huffington and the gray lady Keller had a row - today the strike is getting traction. Yes, she needs to pay for work done but it does appear too coincidental, almost like a payback from Keller who probably has strong ties with the Guild (Trumka).
Agree with you all - the writers should get their pay. I just find the whole thing weird though and believe it’s a set-up engineered by Keller. Huffington I dislike while Keller is pure evil.
I think that she followed the original model developed by AOL.
AOL was built on the backs of unpaid volunteers that maintained the various forums. It is natural for AOL to be drawn to such a model in the present.
Bust the commie union. If you have a spare 3 minutes, type up 700 words of trash and give it to Huffington Post. Better yet, steal a story from a commie/lib “newspaper.” Cross that picket line.
And the Huffington Post! An incestuous relationship, indeed. I'm glad to know that Arianna is just another capitalist, however, she apparently has a greedy streak.
I believe...as 2014 rolls around, that the Huff will be mostly worthless and mostly draining AOL money to keep it afloat. At some point, Ms Huffington will be cut loose and terminated, and the Post will be renamed AOL Post, and likely fold a year later. By 2020, no one will remember anything about the Huffington Post.
Me too, but I'm thinking that there will be some sort of lawsuit. Fairly predictable in any event with liberals. : )
Arrianna’s cult is falling apart?
I doubt she will lose all her bloggers as some are with a real live California cult, MSIA.
This is a creepy woman.
So do these union writers, who don’t get paid to write, pay union dues?
What a racket....PT Barnum and the whole bunch....
It’s a total ripoff and nothing was being done about it until Huffinton’s spat with NYSlimes Keller.
Michael Winship: President
Michael Winship has served as President of the Writers Guild of America, East since 2007, and recently completed two years as senior writer of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. He has written everything from commentary and news to made-for-TV movies, children’s television, musical variety specials, and documentaries. In the course of his long career, Michael has worked for CBS, America’s major PBS stations, the Discovery Networks, A&E, Turner Broadcasting, the Disney Channel, the Children’s Television Workshop, and National Geographic, among others. Michael received the 2009 Emmy Award for excellence in writing and has been nominated for the Writers Guild Award seven times, receiving it in 2004 and 2009.
He writes a weekly column for the 200 daily and weekly newspapers of GateHouse News that also appears on progressive websites worldwide.
http://www.wgaeast.org/index.php?id=90#c620
And their Writers Guild hired a PBS marxist as their President. He even got to give himself the Guild award in 2009. What a gig if you can get it.
Are the PBS people even in a union?
This is the oldest story in the world.
Liberals RAIL against capitalists (whom are not paying enough), while employing people as slaves, themselves (whom are paid nothing at all) They hate capitalism, but have figured out to gain it to their advantage, all the while acting populist. Michael Moore is the king of this.
I don’t mind one bit if Ariana Huffington is wealthy; I do mind, if she has been expecting her contributors to do their work out of the goodness of their heart. With the only reward being a byline.
Even she should have enough sense to be ashamed of that. But I doubt she will.
Looks like PBS is unionized
Check this article out
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2011/03/02/wgbh_says_offer_to_union_is_final/
Thanks libertarian - great article. Boston has over 1000 workers - one wonders how many there are altogether and how much influence.
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