Podcast
Rumpus Events
Rumpus Book ClubWrite for AOL for free
The Huffington Post has been acquired by AOL. If you are a blogger for HuffPo you are now a blogger for AOL.
Here is the letter, sent to Huffington Post contributors this morning, about their community getting a whole lot bigger and letting contributors know that because they are writing for AOL their buried musings will have an “even bigger impact on the national and global conversation.”
We are writing with some very exciting news. As you will see if you click on the HuffPost home page, The Huffington Post has been acquired by AOL, instantly creating one of the biggest media companies in the world, with global, national, and local reach — combining original reporting, opinion, video, social engagement and community, and leveraged across every platform, including the web, mobile, and tablets.
Central to all of this will be the kind of fresh, insightful, and influential takes on the issues of the day that you and the rest of our bloggers regularly deliver. Our bloggers have always been a very big part of HuffPost’s identity – and will continue to be a very big part of who we are.
When the Huffington Post launched in May 2005, we had high hopes. But we would have been hard pressed to predict that less than six years later we would be able to announce a deal that now makes it possible for us to execute our vision at light speed.
The HuffPost blog team will continue to operate as it always has. Arianna will become editor-in-chief not only of HuffPost but of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all of AOL’s content sites, including Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, PopEater, MapQuest, Black Voices, and Moviefone.
Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month — and 250 million around the world — so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That’s the only real change you’ll notice — more people reading what you wrote.
Far from changing the Huffington Post’s editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.
Thank you for being such a vital part of the HuffPost family – which has suddenly gotten a whole lot bigger.
All the best,
Arianna, Roy, David, and the HuffPost Blog Team
February 7th, 2011 at 7:20 am
Aside from scale, is this any different from writing for the Rumpus for free?
February 7th, 2011 at 8:31 am
This was my favorite part of the letter:
“Far from changing the Huffington Post’s editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.”
I wanted more on this. How, exactly, is it like stepping from a train to a jet again?
February 7th, 2011 at 8:45 am
All the money goes to her!
Of course, bloggers/writers get no pay or compensation… even though she wouldn’t have made over $300,000,000 without them.
February 7th, 2011 at 9:05 am
Hi Rob, I would say it’s different. Nobody at The Rumpus lives in a mansion, or makes even much above the poverty line. I do think there is a difference between writing for The Rumpus for free and writing for The Huffington Post, but I understand if people think otherwise.
February 7th, 2011 at 9:24 am
I hate letters which are so full of meaningless hyperbole. It puts the whole announcement into the “spin” category and begs the argument regarding becoming the evil you endeavor to work against, as the HuffPost has always claimed. Nothing can be garnered from this meaningless letter.
Oh, and Arianna was already rich. She is just more rich now. Not surprising, really.
February 7th, 2011 at 9:45 am
Spike: I’m having trouble understanding both your letter and Stephen Elliot’s. People who write for for-profit publications should get compensated. What’s so unreasonable or complicated about that? We don’t ask health care workers or auto mechanics or cashiers to work for our companies and make profits off their labor, why should we ask people who write to do the same?
Yes, some of us want to be heard at any cost because more and more there’s one big corporate speak being published and some of us will volunteer our services on occasion, but we should try to restrict our efforts to letters to the editors and refuse to work for free (or nearly so) more consistently. And Heaven Forbid, we might even think about “organizing” to increase our chances of being heard and taken seriously.
February 7th, 2011 at 9:47 am
TRE, a correction: She wouldn’t have made over $10 without them.
February 7th, 2011 at 11:36 am
Having written a number of article for free or for very little money, I think that there is a big difference between doing that for a for profit company with tons of resources where someone is getting rich off content that you are producing and a non-profit publication, or at least one that shares your values.
I suspect that writers have given their work to Huff Post without receiving any compensation because they felt a sense of common purpose and writers will be less willing to do this now. (The other, non-financial part of the quid pro quo is that having an article on Huff Post is a big platform for your work and ideas. Obviously, this will continue to be the case whether you get paid or not.)
I suspect that this gives more meaning to The Nations’ (charming, but not exactly accurate) slogan, No One Owns the Nation. That claim for Huff Post would no longer pass the laugh test.
Regardless, doesn’t 315M seem like a ridiculous amount of money? (Especially given how undervalued writers are, the ones that actually create the “content,” stories that we pour thought, attention, and care into.)
What do they think it is, 1999, when people actually used AOL?
February 7th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Hmm, I remember when AOL was willing to offer the princely some of some pennies a word to the drones who wrote for their place pages. I declined not so much by the money involved (no one was paying me to write on the blog that lead to the solicitation) but by their suggestion I might have to tone it down a bit, nothing too dark or angry, which makes me wonder why HuffPo? I guess a continuous stream of free marketable content with a large audience must have been irresistable however dark or angry it might prove to be.
February 7th, 2011 at 2:04 pm
I can’t wait to see what kind of a clusterfuck their new entry pages will be. Will the combination of their sucktastic design aesthetics be additive or exponential? We may witness the end of the universe here.
February 7th, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Speaking as someone who occasionally writes for the Rumpus and HuffPo for free, I will venture a response to Michelle’s question.
Since this post was about Huff Post, I will start there, although I feel more passionately about what I say about occasionally contributing for free to the Rumpus (below).
So anyway, first, the Huffington Post does pay its writers. It has a staff of full-time paid reporters and editors. They generate original content, cover politics and everything else, and receive competitive salaries and health care benefits. Some of them are my friends, so I know first-hand that they are a talented, hardworking, dedicated group.
My own case might explain why someone would blog for the Huffington Post for free. I don’t make my living from writing (unless you count my day job). I write for fun in my spare time, as a hobby of sorts. I write a piece for the Huff Post comedy page when something in the world of politics bothers me — the Republican party nominates the spawn of Satan as its Vice Presidential candidate, for example, or President Obama minces his words and otherwise reacts too cautiously to the democratic protests in Egypt — and I happen to think of a good way express my viewpoint in a piece of satire. It might take me an hour or two to write the piece, and within a matter of minutes I can share it with a wide audience. It’s a privilege to be able to do this, and a valuable commodity. I’m lucky, in other words, to have my own small internet soapbox in the virtual pubic square.
Based on my own limited experience, the market value of my comedy posts on the Huff Post comedy page is probably around $50 each, maybe less than that, although to be fair, when he was asked last summer at the Tin House Writing Workshop what outlets there were for short comedy pieces, New Yorker contributor and former Simpson’s writer Larry Doyle said simply, “There aren’t any.” Then after thinking about for a few seconds he said, “I don’t know, McSweeney’s maybe?”
What I’m saying is, it would be nice if Huff Post paid me $50 ever time I posted a piece piece of satire they deemed worthy of their front page, but I’m not going to let that become the only factor in my decision to write for them. Given my situation, and my interest in occasionally having access to a wide audience to make a point in the national political conversation, thinking about it that way wouldn’t make sense.
There are other considerations as well. Since I’m not being paid anything, I’m keeping the rights to all of my work, for whatever that is worth (rim shot). But when commercial websites do pay you for your comedy writing, they demand that you sign over all the rights to the work, for all time, forever. I’ve done that, and in the end I didn’t feel that much better about the bargain I had struck.
It’s a completely different transaction when I write something for the Rumpus. I love the Rumpus. There’s no internet literary community like it. I have tremendous respect for the writers who contribute to the Rumpus, and some of them are also friends of mine. The Rumpus is fun. It’s alive. Publish a book of stories and essays by women on a whim and a three-month deadline and then make a faux pin-up calendar to promote the project? Who else would do that? Well, OK, a lot of small presses would. But who else would do it with so much style? The Rumpus reaches a smaller audience, but it’s an audience I feel much more connected to and care much more about. And so, on the occasions when I’m able to contribute to the Rumpus, it’s a completely different kind of privilege, but still a privilege.
There are concerns that are larger than money, is what I’m saying. When you write for free, you’re doing it for one reason — out of love. I love writing occasionally for Huffington Post and the Rumpus, although for entirely different reasons, and that inspiration, hopefully, is reflected in my work. That’s why I do it.
February 7th, 2011 at 7:30 pm
The main thing that I want to know is, when they say that Arianna will become the editor of AOL media, meaning that she will retain editorial control of HP, is that a lifelong appointment; will she get to choose her successor? As long as she remains in control of the Post, to me it retains its integrity. If the AOL honchos ever take control of the content on HP, then it will just be another part of the MSM.
As far as the “red tide,” I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing to bring together people of widely differing opinions on one site. The problems could come if there are discussions that are specifically relevant to one group of people, and trolls start coming in and disrupting it. I hope that there will be (or already is) some method of preventing that, so that, basically, if people in the same general camp are attempting to debate the subtleties of an issue, they won’t be interrupted by people trashing their entire political philosophy.