- HuffPo not for sale yet, but reformulating with injection of venture capital;

- (61) paid staff, including (5) paid reporters, has recently issued raises to the chagrin of other media outlets, and is preparing to expand to local sites;

- Arianna explains HuffPo’s pay policy in this video. Which begs the question: when people are willing to bid as much as $13,500 in a charity auction for an internship (see first link this comment), why pay for non-journalist (often celebrity) bloggers?

First, the author bashes GuestOfAGuest.com’s Rachelle Hruska for not paying staff, yet conveniently misses these facts clearly laid out in the NYT’s profile of Hruska: “Ms. Griffith, with other Hamptons interns, works for food and gas, living rent-free in a three-story home with two acres of beachfront property and a pool, owned by a friend of Ms. Hruska’s.”

INTERNS. Get it? it’s very common for interns not to be compensated; they receive experience they would otherwise have a difficult time getting, and in this case, the gig comes with accomodations, food and partying? Jeebus. I’d have been only too tickled to find such a deal in my college days, especially during a deep recession. (Just how much is rent for the summer in the Hamptons anyhow?)

ASSME, which is cited in the Gawker piece and is bent out of shape about Hruska’s non-payment of interns, is the American Society of Shit-canned Media Elites. In other words, disgruntled former media employees who are likely looking for paid work in a glutted market. What exactly do you think they are going to say?

Secondly, with regard to Gawker’s whining about HuffPo’s business model: do you actually see any information in that post where Gawker called Arianna and asked her about her business model? do you see where they asked anybody in management at HuffPo about their compensation policy – who gets paid and for what?

And Gawker pays for that kind of content? I’d have kicked it back at any team member who submitted it to me without clearly labeling it as [OPINION] first and without getting feedback directly from HuffPo.

May I suggest when reading content that you ask, “What’s the agenda, and who’s agenda is it?” It’s not like Gawker wouldn’t be in competition with HuffPo, would they, and hurting from the downturn in the economy along with a glut of competition?

For this reason I think you need to do more homework on the remuneration.

Really.

And if you’re going to use that as a rule of thumb, then you need to ask other outlets how much they pay their people, too.

(BTW, they be great regurgitators Gawker’s not exactly a source I’d have let any of my team use as a primary source.)

http://gawker.com/5299052/slav…..ofit-model

what my point was in terms of not paying bloggers for their work wasn’t in relation to you get what you pay for, but more a matter of common human decency.

how much does Arianna make a year? if i worked for a living as a blogger, i would not want it to be standard fare that my contributions were not deserving of a reasonable remuneration.

Take a look at Quantcast’s top sites listing and look at which news/blogging sites are most popular in terms of traffic. CNN may rank higher (31) than either NYTimes (63) or HuffPo (76), but CNN is not a newspaper site nor is it a blog-news site, which WaPo (154) is or has tried to be.

I didn’t pick USAToday (111) because it’s a national newspaper and WaPo has not really tried to compete in that market, choosing instead to syndicate contributors’ content to local newspapers nationally.

I have different opinion, having worked in new media. While I’m not the target demographic of HuffPo, I’m also not the target demographic for American Idol or Survivor or many other pop culture programs which combine entertainment with a reality component and audience participation. It’s hard to argue with the popularity of such programming, and it’s a similar audience which finds HuffPo popular as well.

Sandwiched in between the fluffy celebrity commentary and paparazzi fluff is real news which might not otherwise reach that same audience; they don’t sit around watching the 6pm or 11pm news, after all. They will make time for content which is authentic and engaging and in real time.

I’ll point to Nico Pitney’s liveblogging of events in Iran as quality news which even mainstream media professionals have admired; Nico was far ahead of most national outlets, even days after the election. This is just one example of news which a platform like HuffPo can support and other outlets can’t.

As for Arianna: her role at her organization isn’t that of content creator, never really has been. She’s been an executive all along as editor-in-chief. In that kind of role I’d expect her to shape the overall brand of the site more than create content. In contrast, Jane was a content creator from the first day she started this blog, even though she’s assumed a more executive capacity at this site over time. Although they were both born in the same decade, there’s a nearly a generational shift between Arianna and Jane as well, like that between Boomers and Gen X, which influenced their experiences and how they use and react to technology and politics. This play some role in how they position themselves within their respective sites.

And I also caution you about the blogging-for-pay as a criteria for generating quality content. One can’t swing a stick without hitting quality citizen journalists and opinion bloggers who don’t get paid much or at all at many kinds of outlets, which doesn’t diminish the work they do. What many contributors paid and unpaid can expect at HuffPo is enormous traffic they would not otherwise receive for their work, and in turn help push the mainstream media to play catch up and do their job.

The traffic numbers are, doubtlessly, accurate. But, the whole story seems crafted a bit to appeal to the prospective buyer.

Caveat lector, is all I’m saying.

“new media,” as Arianna so belatedly refers to it, is a relatively new kind of beast. to me credibility and consistency of supposed factual information are essential. next, which is where almost all american media sources fail miserably, is the depth and nuance of the coverage. news in america is not only often error-filled but also so superficial as to seem retarded (especially during and after the BushCheney regime). another key to quality news is their independence. HuffPo, according to Justin Raimondo, is compromised in its ability to report unbiasedly. Although Raimondo’s blog has become increasingly “rightest” after the rise of Obama, his credibility of reportage during the Bush years were noteworthy. (remember that was when all of them major news outlets were badly compromised by the BushCheney felons.)

Arianna seems to be rather peripheral to HuffPo: her contributions, from my perspective, seem marginal. Look at how many posts Jane has published just today: it’s like 3 weeks worth of Arianna.

Lastly, is it true that bloggers don’t get paid at HuffPo? If so, i would discourage any self-respecting commenter or blogger from holding that paparazzi rag up as an example of what a good blog is like.