Kevin Allman

Write for free!: Huffington Post's massage oasis at the Dem convention

Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post can't afford to pay the site's bloggers -- it's not part of the business model, don't you know, darling -- but somehow she can dig up the shekels for this:

[W]e've decided to demonstrate that a balanced life is possible even during the most compulsively hectic days in the political calendar. So during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, HuffPost's Living section will offer harried conventioneers -- including delegates and members of the media -- a chance to unplug and recharge at the HuffPost Oasis.

The Oasis will feature complimentary yoga classes, Thai massages, hand massages, mini-facials, healthy snacks and refreshments, music, and a comfortable seating area for lounging and unwinding.

Well, that's one way to make sure you keep getting hand-massaged press for your online company. Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is the massage.

Anyone at the convention want to keep tabs on which poor overworked beleaguered members of the media are lining up for a free facial and hand massage from Arianna? And are bloggers eligible for Arianna's ministrations, or is it just "delegates and members of the media"?

Write for free!: Critical raves for the Huffington Post's Chicago début

New York Post, Page Six:

JOHN Cusack learned he should stick to acting with his first piece for the Huffington Post Chicago - which was "riddled with more errors than the 2006 Cubs," according to one blogger. Cusack, who was writing about his childhood as a fan of the Cubs, the White Sox, Michael Jordan and Walter Payton, managed to misspell the names of three Cubs players and of playwright Eugene O'Neill. Cusack also erroneously stated that Sammy Sosa played for the '89 Cubs. Finally, the "High Fidelity" star described taking the "express" train to Wrigley Field. There has never been an express to Wrigley. Cusack - whose last two movies, "Grace Is Gone" and "War, Inc.," were both anti-war bombs - also described how he would "scrape together $2.50" to go to a baseball game. "Cusack grew up in a massive house on Sheridan Road," said another reader of the Beachwood Reporter Web site. "It's slightly disingenuous to say he had to 'scrape' together $2.50. I'm thinking that wasn't an issue."

Gawker, in a piece called "Celebutards: John Cusack's Love Letter To Chicago Sports Is Worst Celebrity Blog Post Ever Written":

Last week the Say Anything actor and Hilary Duff mentor wrote a 732-word celebrity blog post commemorating the launch of Huffington Post Chicago -- hey wait I thought the internet meant the end of 'placeness'!? -- that contained somewhere between eight and infinity errors. Yeah, and it was about his childhood....

If no one at Huffington Post is reading this shit — at least not closely enough to catch a misspelling of the name Michael freaking Jordan — why are we expected to?

Defamer also has more.

Oh, well. At least Cusack didn't plagiarize it!

Write for free!: Froma Harrop on the Huffington Post

I missed this editorial from last December, in which syndicated columnist Froma Harrop takes apart Arianna Huffington's electronic-sweatshop business model:

Paying bloggers is “not our financial model,” The Huffington Post’s co-founder, Ken Lerer, told USAToday. 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 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 trickle-down glamour. It’s Blogging with the Stars....

Great piece, well worth a read. Go Froma!

Write for free!: Not everyone in Chicago is thrilled with the Huffington Post

Steve Rhodes of The Beachwood Reporter seems as unthrilled with the new Huffington Post Chicago as I am, and his disenchantment made the front page of Romenesko's Medianews this a.m.

Letters...he gets letters:

From a Beachwood reader:

"I submitted a comment to John Cusack's meandering love letter on the Chicago edition of the Huffington Post about eight hours ago. It hasn't posted yet. I'm wondering if one of the conditions of the pro bono agreement is that no negative comments will be brooked. Or perhaps I shone too bright a light on the lazy (or nonexistent) editing over there. I was not nasty. I simply wondered why Cusack neglected to correctly spell Biittner, Jordan, Chelios, and O'Neill (as in Eugene; I have to admit I also pointed out O'Neill was born in the US, not Ireland). Additionally, Cusack mistakenly wrote Eddie Gaedel pinch-hit for the White Sox and Sammy Sosa was on the '89 Cubs.

"It's no big deal, but it makes me wonder what other comments aren't being published (or taking an ungodly amount of time to post). I completely understand spelling and fact-checking make for uninteresting reading for some (okay, maybe most), but it's got to be more compelling than a bunch of 'OMG, I love Chicago, too!'"

Another reader had the same experience:

"Incidentally, I posted an not-positive comment about Cusack's little Chicago jerk-off piece. It didn't make it on the site, interestingly."

Rhodes notes:

As of this morning the post had 34 comments, all of them positive.

Oddly, all of this seems to contradict Arianna's stated comments policy:

We never censor comments based on political or ideological point of view. We only delete those comments that are abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language, or include ad hominem attacks.

On another page, the HuffPost goes into more detail:

Huffington Post pre-moderates comments on our blog posts and post-moderates comments on news stories. We never censor comments based on political or ideological point of view. We only delete those comments that include the following transgressions:

• are abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language
• include ad hominem attacks including comments that celebrate the death or illness of any person, public figure or otherwise
• contain racist, sexist, homophobic and other slurs
• are solicitations and/or advertising for personal blogs and websites
• thread spamming (you've posted this same comment elsewhere on the site
• are posted with the explicit intention of provoking other commenters or the staff at Huffington Post.

Hey, rabble: don't provoke the staff! But there's more:

There are two scenarios for which your comment may not appear...

2. Your comment violated the policy above. We pride ourselves in providing a medium for engaging and thought-provoking stories and encourage our users to speak their minds freely, provided comments fall within our commenting policy. We must respect our writers and protect them from vicious and inflammatory comments. They too are entitled to free speech- the right to share their opinions without being subject to scathing and mean-spirited remarks.

Or, it seems, any negative feedback at all.

It doesn't sound to me like the readers of the Beachwood Reporter were provoking or scathing -- they just found errors on the site, or didn't like what they read and wanted to discuss it.

Now I don't just want to ask Arianna about her business model of not paying her writers -- I want to know more about the site's comment policy. I'd love to ask her -- politely, not provokingly or scathingly -- about all this, but her representative, Mario Ruiz, still isn't returning my phone calls.

Write for free!: Huffington Post Chicago débuts

Since I groused about Arianna Huffington's business model over at Romenesko's Medianews (nutshell: writers work for free while Arianna sells ads), Huffington Post Chicago has made its début. It's the first of many localized sites that Ms. Huffington is planning as online Internet newspapers of sorts, featuring a mix of ruminations from her celebrity pals (Chicago already has essays by John Cusack and Saturday Night Live guy Fred Armisen) and local content gathered from other unpaid sources.

Armisen's contribution isn't likely to dim misty cigar-smoky memories of Mike Royko:

Public transportation is really good in Chicago. Travel tip: to get a nice view of the city, take the Brown Line.

And I love the chocolate made by Vosges, which is based in Chicago. They make these really crazy chocolate bars -- and not the dumb kind of crazy. I mean the brilliant kind of crazy. They actually make a chocolate bar with BACON! Is there anything yummier?

Is Armisen kidding? Is Arianna kidding? I read better, more informative stuff on any neighborhood blog in town. Hell, I read better stuff on the bulletin board outside my building's laundry room. As for Cusack's musings, a blogger calling himself "So-Called Austin Mayor" noted:

Unfortunately, in that short piece, Mr. Cusack misspelled the name of former Cub, Larry Biittner. And he misspelled the name of former Blackhawk, Chris Chelios.

And the HuffPoChi's inaugural post repeatedly misspelled the name of a former member of the Chicago Bulls -- a fella named Michael Jordan.

Michael Freakin' Jordan!

I guess if you don't need to pay writers, you don't need to pay copy editors either.

Right now on the front page of HuffPost Chicago, the writing is more professional. Unfortunately, it's also less original: a writeup of Bernie Mac's funeral and a Cubs story (both taken straight from the AP), and a bunch of links from the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times, Chicago Business, and other papers.

In other words: professional newsgathering organizations have paid professional writers to do professional work, and then Arianna comes in, creates links to their creations, and sells ads on her own page. How progressive.

That's not right. That's beyond not right. That's just The Drudge Report with an Eva Gabor accent.

Think she can't do it in your city? Well, she can, and she intends to:

We plan to roll out local versions of HuffPost in dozens of cities. So check out HuffPost Chicago and use the comment section to let us know what you think, what you want more of, what you want less of, and what cities you think should be next.

No, I'll do it here:

1. I think it's shabby, Arianna.
2. More pay.
3. Less ripping off writers.
4. Stay the hell out of New Orleans. We've been ripped off enough.

If you're getting the idea this is personal, it is. I've been hired to consult with Gambit, the alt-weekly here in New Orleans, and I'm working on their Web site, Blog of New Orleans (aka Gambit Daily). We're introducing guest bloggers on the site (bloggers, it should be noted, whose work kicks the shit out of Messrs. Cusack and Armisen) and the first rule was: guest bloggers get paid. (Not much, but they get checks, fill out tax forms, the whole W-9 yards.) I wouldn't be asking them to do it otherwise -- I've been agitating for years against the cruel hoax of "writing for exposure," and I believe what writers do is worth money. And respect.

And speaking of respect: peep out what the progressive HuffPost folk did to Marilyn Ferdinand, one of their many "unpaid citizen journalists" or whatever they call them. Marilyn came across my anti-HuffPo letter and had an experience of her own:

As some of you know, our site is affiliated with The Beachwood Reporter. I went to listen to some panel discussions at the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication conference held last week in Chicago, one of which included Steve Rhodes, the founder and general manager of The Beachwood. Afterwards, Steve, another journalist, and I chatted, and one topic that came up was the advance work The Huffington Post was doing to get writers for its Chicago site. I was not approached, but both of them had been and were asked to work "pro bono," in other words, for free. Arianna Huffington is a multimillionaire, yet she is asking professional journalists to work for free. We all thought this was outrageous. If she wants to give space to unqualified celebrities like Deepak Chopra to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that's her business. They don't need the money, but they like the visibility....

The Huffington Post-Chicago premiered today. The comments thread under the site's introductory post were very positive, thrilled that Ms. Huffington chose our terrific burg to splash down in. That'll teach New York and Los Angeles who The Second City isn't! I thought I'd like to greet HuffPo a little differently by posting Allman's letter with my own comments. I'm still a registered HuffPo blogger from my brief stint with OfftheBus, so it should have gone up unmolested. It didn't. I watched the "Comments Pending" number carefully, seeing it go up and down and eventually reach zero. Strangely, my post didn't appear. I wrote another post that said HuffPo was censoring my comment, and it didn't appear. I tried another approach and responded to another comment with information that HuffPo doesn't pay its writers. It didn't appear either. I sent a final comment announcing my intention to write about this disgraceful disregard for working people and the censorship that seemed to be underway to ensure a lovefest for HuffPo's entry into the Chicago market.

I don't agree with Marilyn that it's "censorship" -- the Huffington Post is privately owned, and the editors can do whatever they like with the comments. But it's damned amusing that a "progressive" site neither pays its writers nor brooks dissent among the unpaid.

When my letter appeared on Medianews, I heard from a couple of professional journos who said the same thing: "Good for you" and "Oooh, you took on Arianna Huffington." Took her on? What's she going to do, not pay me to not write for her?

So I'll close here by throwing down. I have an interview request in for Arianna with Mario Ruiz, her VP of media relations. We'll see if she'll talk to me for free.

In the meantime, if any professional writers want to join in here, feel free to do so in comments. Let's get this party started. Journalism -- and journalists' jobs -- are already on life support.

DO NOT WRITE FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST FOR FREE.

Write for free!: Huffington Post goes local

The Huffington Post makes its long-predicted foray into local journalism tomorrow with the début of a Chicago edition. Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune breaks it down here.

I took exception to this:

Ben Goldberger, 25, a former Chicago Sun-Times staffer, will be the only paid employee here. Ad sales will be handled from HuffPo's office in New York. Writers work pro bono.

Pro bono /= free, and that's exactly what the local Huffingbloggers will be working for: free. As in "exposure," which is newmediaspeak for bupkis. You write for free; Arianna Huffington sells ads.

This is "progressive" media?

I've blogged a lot about media companies that expect people to write for free (archives here), and I bitched about it again this morning on Jim Romenesko's Medianews site at Poynter.org.

Write for free! at Examiner.com

The latest in the Write For Free! series:

Chris Landers at the Baltimore City Paper notes that Examiner.com is adding a lot of bloggers to its site. Their compensation?

"Consideration: In consideration of the Services, you will be provided exposure of your name and the Web Page. You understand that you will not initially receive any other compensation for performance of the Services. However, if the Web Page obtains traffic levels and/or other performance metrics determined by Examiner.com from time to time, you may be eligible for a performance-based incentive ("Incentive"), which would be paid according to a formula and metrics to be provided to you by Examiner.com, as modified by Examiner.com from time to time in its sole discretion."

De-bullshitted, I think that means that Examiner.com might pay its bloggers someday, if the site achieves some amount of traffic that they will determine, though they could move the goalposts at any time, and then they'll decide what the pay might be and let you know.

I'd say that the best way to get "exposure of your name" is to start a blog under your own name and not someone else's umbrella, but I guess that would limit the chance ever to earn a "performance-based incentive."

The entire blogger agreement is here. I ran a word count: 4266 words. I guess the Examiner.com bloggers are expected to read that for free, too.

The Publishers Weekly pay cuts

Over at Critical Mass (the official blog of the National Book Critics Circle), Jane Ciabattari reproduced the following memo from an editor at Publishers Weekly:

We are under constraints to reduce our expenses and must reduce the fee we pay to reviewers. Any reviews assigned after June 15 will be billed at $25 per review. However, you will be credited as a contributor in issues where your reviews appear. Please know that we value the work you do for us....

Et cetera.

The comments section at Critical Mass is, naturally, en fuego with discussion, and it seems to have tapped into a great deal of ill will toward PW and its policies. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of PW, weighs in with a response that reads, in part:

I hope that PW reviewers, like one of the people who posted here, see the pay as an honorarium rather than a salary, and will continue to review because they love books and believe in PW as much as we believe in them....

In the past, I've reviewed exactly twice for PW, at terms not much better than $25 per review. I won't discuss the exact terms of the "honorarium," but it was 5%-15% of what I could, and do, get elsewhere for the same amount of work. (We parted ways fairly quickly, though not, mostly, for financial reasons.)

The problem with PW's reviews, I think, is that they're so very, very weighty -- a good review in PW can result in hundreds of libraries buying a title, and a marketing department devoting more energy to promoting it. The reviews are front-and-center on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, influencing online buyers for years. In short, a good PW review (particularly a starred one) can affect sales in the same disproportionate way that a New York Times rave theater review can disproportionately affect a show's box office.

Conversely, a pan from PW can sink a fledgling writer before he or she gets out of the gate.

That's a hell of a lot of clout for a $25 review. And a hell of a lot of responsibility to give to someone who can afford to work for $25.

When your pay scale is that low, you're necessarily going to be attracting inexperienced reviewers. Not to say that they can't be good, but I wonder if editors and agents explain to authors (particularly first-time authors) that the fate of their books can lie with a reviewer who can afford the time and energy to take $25 as payment.

Is a $500 review necessarily "better" or more authoritative than a $25 review?

(Other bloggers are talking about it here and here.)

Write for free!: more thoughts

Lots of discussion over my latest entry in "Write For Free!," much of it coming from the entry that Matt Davis began at the Portland Mercury's blog. It's all great, but a couple of comments there and elsewhere made me realize that I didn't express my thoughts well.

Patrick Snajder said "Some are complaining that such writers are merely unpaid freelancers," which is true...but my complaint isn't with the freelancers, it's with the lack of payment.

J. Michael Lyons, a Ph.D. student at Indiana University, is even more pointed:

We have entered an era of participatory culture where all kinds of people are allowed to voice their opinion and produce things, from recipes to journalism. Their payment is not in money but in the act of participation. Get it?

I get it. But I still think that if someone uses your work (be it a recipe or a news story) for profit, you should be paid, just like any other freelancer. Because that's what you are.

Any other model just perpetuates the tired notion that "citizen journalists" are some sort of underclass, there's some sort of boundary between professional reporters and citizen journalists. Not so; there are good and lousy people at all levels of journalism, and the only criterion is (or should be) the quality of the work, whether it's in The Washington Post or on a blog.

One thing I hadn't even considered was how this is playing out in other fields, such as graphic design. Samuel John Klein notes that "graphic designers deal with this centrifugal pressure too," noting that graphics folks are often asked to work for free "to build a portfolio," or enter questionable design and logo contests. So it's not just writers whose work is being devalued.

My gripe isn't with writers. It's with those who would make money off writers' work and then deny them even a few crumbs of the profits. If citizen journalists are good enough to publish, they're good enough to be called what they are: freelance writers. And they're good enough to be paid.

Work for free!: Marc Cooper responds

Marc Cooper responded -- politely but forcefully -- to my comments about OffTheBus yesterday. His whole response is worth reading (and I encourage you to do so), but this is his salient point:

Your criticism, by implication, discounts any and all notions of citizen journalism. If a precondition for being published is that you must be paid, and therefore meet a whole series of professional standards, then you close the door on all of the democratic opportunities offered by the Web.

He also says that contributors to OffTheBus are a varied bunch:

The overwhelming majority of our contributors were previously unpublished and untested. Most of them are NOT correspondents or reporters but, instead, have decided to invest an hour or two a week in our distributive research projects i.e. attending an event and filling out a data form and adding some personal observations. These contributors perform their work enthusiastically and have expressed a great satisfaction in being able to participate in such a collective effort.

Some of our individual reporters are, in fact, well-paid journalists who have ASKED us for the chance to publish work their employers are no interested in. Other correspondents of ours are fully employed otherwise and are, in fact, delighted to be able to moonlight as citizen reporters and see their work read by thousands of Huffington Post readers.

Other contributors are previously existing citizen blogger-journalists working for free for themselves -- exactly-- as you do and we have merely reached agreements with them to re-purpose their material and help build traffic for their own sites.

Yet others among our contributors are newbies and are quite happy to exchange their work for the professional assistance and support offered by our quite modestly paid staff. The pieces we publish are often edited, reworked and improved by our professional staff.

I emailed Cooper with some questions after reading this, and he answered them directly, with the proviso that I not quote him directly, nor characterize him as a spokesman for the Huffington Post. Fair enough.

Cooper says that OffTheBus is a "non-profit" -- a detail not mentioned in The New York Times story that got my attention in the first place. (Indeed, OffTheBus -- while published on The Huffington Post website -- does not carry banner ads or other advertising, as does the Post itself. Otherwise, it looks just like any other sub-page of the HuffPost. That, I think, is a problem.)

But Cooper, in his email, says that not only will the site not accept ads: in fact, doing so would violate both its spirit and the law. OffTheBus has been funded by private donations, and will have no ad sales staff (though it does have one ad that's somehow built into the framework of the entire HuffPost site and can't be removed--see how this gets sticky?).

The Huffington Post, of course, is an online political magazine, and a spectacularly influential one. It has a paid reporting and editing staff, along with unpaid opinion contributors (many of whom are celebrities), and the site does sell ads. OffTheBus, Cooper stresses, is a much more shoestring and diffuse operation, with a variety of unpaid contributors with a variety of levels of experience, being edited by a much smaller staff.

With OffTheBus, Cooper draws the analogy of community theater: talented amateurs, "performing" for no money, in exchange for exposure, training, and the chance to get actual remunerative work.

I see it, and I don't see it; journalism in the Internet age is morphing so fast that it's hard to keep up with its ever-changing ethics. And if unpaid freelancers are being supervised by anyone, I'm glad it's by a journalist like Marc Cooper, whose work and bona fides are unassailable; I'd be happy to be edited by him. (Or by his "professional staff.") And I'm reassured that Cooper has thought these things out, that he understands the pitfalls involved and is sensitive to them. In the hands of a less scrupulous editor or company, this model could be sheer exploitation, depending on a constant supply of fresh young talent as the veterans get discouraged and give up.

But still...the "Work For Free!" journalism paradigm doesn't sit well with me. There's an unpriceable thrill for a young writer when that person realizes that the words he or she sweated over has some monetary value, that writing is a talent and a craft, a commodity as valuable as any other job.

Is that romantic? Probably. But I think Cooper agrees, at least in part. As he said in the comments to my original post:

I don't know about you, but in my case (back around 1970) I was paid $20 and sometimes less for the first pieces I published. I remember the first time I got paid $100 and thought I was going to pass out from excitement. And this was for for-profit outlets (OffTheBus.net is a NON-PROFIT). My writing wasn't worth much more at the time, but certainly had a value greater than twenty bucks. As my writing and confidence improved, I was able to raise my rates and move up the market ladder.

I know the feeling. But I just want to make sure that the "citizen journalist" movement is helping new writers move up the ladder...not yanking it out from under them.