Boycott Huffington Post
As some but by no means all progressives know, the Newspapers Guild and the National Writers Union have called a boycott against Huffington Post for refusing to pay its writers. Unlike unionized workplaces like the New York Times, Huffington Post exploits laborers desperate to get in print by offering them a byline without compensation while Ariana Huffington makes millions. The unions want the writers to get paid and to have greater editorial control over their content.
I completely support this boycott. I refuse to read anything at HuffPo or to link there. Ultimately, HuffPo is surviving on the adjunct model. Like higher education with its hordes of PhDs with no job prospects, there is a huge supply of writers who want to make a living in journalism. HuffPo offers the promise of gaining valuable experience and readership so that someday, maybe, you can make it big.
This is a dishonest proposition by HuffPo. It is almost impossible in 2011 to go from a no one to a big name blogger. The blogosphere is ossified. During the explosion of the medium from 2004-06, young writers could produce excellent work and become big name people. Then, by 2007, those were the only blogs people read. Today, those are the prominent and still young writers of the progressive blogosphere. And they aren’t going anywhere.
There are a few exceptions to this. You can have extremely specialized skills like Nate Silver. You can learn Arabic and become a specialist in the Middle East like Matt Duss. I have no doubt there is room for some people to learn Chinese and get a job writing at quality sites. Those people deserve the readership they have gained. But what HuffPo promises, that a jerk like me or you can come to their site and get started in a long career in journalism is precisely the same exploitative relationship that allows universities to hire legions of adjuncts and continue to produce PhDs. It ensures a supply of cheap or unpaid labor that allows for a corporate model to maximize profit at the top while serving readers/students for the foreseeable future with workers desperate enough to live their dreams that they will do a heck of a job.
One of my biggest critiques of the progressive blogosphere and young progressives in general is a lack of concern over labor. Almost inevitably, when a major site discusses labor, a big section of the comments devolve into people normally good on most issues questioning whether unions are outdated. Class consciousness and solidarity among young educated people is almost dead in this country. A whole lot of people see an information society as a workplace they can succeed in on merit if only they just work a little bit harder, write that one more article, etc.
Remarkably, even labor-oriented progressives are split about this boycott. Robert Reich for instance continues to write at HuffPo, arguing, as this Mike Elk piece at In These Times shows, that he is writing op-eds for free, as he would to the New York Times. But Reich is also supporting a large and profitable corporation who undermines unionization attempts, yet makes false claims to being supportive of social justice in this nation and the world.
Robert Reich is absolutely wrong on this issue.
From Elk’s piece:
“Now it appears that even leading progressives who should be setting a good behavioral example for younger activists care little about respecting a labor boycott with growing support,” says labor journalist, former CWA union organizer Steve Early, who is honoring the boycott of the Huffington Post. (He’s also a contributor to Working In These Times.) “Who’s going to take these guys seriously when they preach to us about the need for social and workplace solidarity but then completely ignore the collective efforts of the Guild and the National Writers Union to make HuffPo a more responsible employer of freelance labor?”
Wherever one stands on the issue of the Huffington Post’s use of unpaid labor, it’s progressives—who are both participating and not participating in the picket line—who will determine the future of what’s acceptable for labor practices in the journalism industry.
Indeed.
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If we take this to it’s logical end point does that mean we need to boycott Google as well?
Their model depends on a massive amount of content on the web that needs to be organized, much of which is produced at no cost to Google, nor are authors compensated by another entity.
If you allow Google to direct readers to your website, you can post your own ads on your website and profit. Google provides a service (directing users to content), and you provide a service (providing content). If you’re good, readers can bookmark your website and bypass Google for purposes of reading your content.
With HP, you have no independent revenue stream. All you can hope for is to develop a following and hope that they follow you when you jump ship.
I would say a big part of that problem is a lack of recognition that they are labor.
Yes, indeed.
In fact, I’d go so far to say that people think they have transcended “labor,” since that’s something that only applies to burly men with mustaches working in factories and beating on hippies.
Could somebody please explain to me the modern left’s fixation with the “beating/punching hippies” metaphor?
I don’t mean, “Explain to me the tension between blue-collars and hippies in the late ’60s, which occasionally manifested in violence.” I mean, explain why this arcane social phenomenon from four decades ago has become a go-to bit of imagery these past couple of years on the left.
It seems to have this incredible grip on the imagination of 21st century progressives. I don’t get it. What makes it especially weird is that there’s no modern analog to hippies, except perhaps certain segments of the libertarian sphere.
This is a really good question. I don’t know quite how it got started on the internet, but I think the root of it is the trade unions guys beating up hippies in New York in the late 60s, which was a very symbolic and important moment in a larger trend that cleaved the left in a way that it has not yet recovered.
That may be the root, but its current use is somewhat mocking, since, as TomD types, there are no analogues to hippies any nore.
Part of it is a reaction to attempts by the Very Serious People to be very serious, which they do by mocking anything that might move the proverbial Overton Window to the left as “hippie stuff,” unserious, yada.
You might inquire at Balloon Juice, which is where I encounter the phrase most, but there’s no entry for it in the B.J. lexicon.
Hear hear. With special emphasis on the “over labor” part as it applies to other professions – notably, public school teachers in re “education reform.”
Far too many of my colleagues, especially in Business and Law, confuse the right to make employment recommendations (the decisions still rest with the administration) and to boss the departmental admin around with actual management functions.
I agree.
Most of them have been indoctrinated into thinking “Labor” are bad people (socialists, etc.).
They will awaken eventually.
Just to be clear, which writers exactly are we talking about being exploited here?
The masses of unpaid bloggers who provide the bulk of content for the site.
So the “citizen journalists” or whatever they’re being called AND the people typing up their opinions and sending them in to be published without compensation? That seems a tad much, honestly, unless HuffPo has implied some sort of compensation.
Also, why wouldn’t this apply to something like Daily Kos as well? Markos pockets the bulk of the ad revenue for the site, even though the vast majority of his content and traffic is generated by unpaid diarists, correct?
Perhaps then the same analysis should apply to Daily Kos, although to some extent it also matters I think how much money Kos is making. I’m not going to comment further on this line because I don’t know anything about the Kos business model or how much money it pulls in.
Fair enough.
I just think there’s a pretty big hole cut out in this argument where the interests of people who know they’re not compensated for this (and in terms of Op-Eds probably shouldn’t be, to some extent) but do it anyway, voluntarily, because they enjoy it and want to have an audience for their writing aren’t really considered.
And so long as submitting content is done on a totally voluntary basis, I can’t really get outraged by it. Though I quit reading HuffPo long ago because the quality is awful and the medical quackery is outrageous.
Though of course the arguments of 19th century employers was that their workers voluntarily worked at the factory. They could always quit if they wanted. I realize the comparison is not strictly analogous but I might argue you have a somewhat narrower view of what constitutes labor than I do.
That’s patently absurd. Workers at a 19th century factory had to work to make even the sub-standard wages they made in order to survive. They couldn’t quit in part because they’d starve and in part because they wouldn’t get a better shake anywhere else. How is that at all analogous to someone voluntarily submitting something they wrote because they wanted to to be published somewhere?
I guess I’m coming at this from a wholly different perspective because I’ve had to endure the harangues of people insisting I’m destroying the sports page and killing jobs in the newspaper business because I’ve got the audacity to publish my opinion about baseball somewhere even though I can’t afford to spend a summer or two running down research for Peter King or making sure Mike Lupica’s dinner reservations are in order so that I can “pay my dues” and “come up the right way.”
And no, in no way do I do it because I have to and I could stop doing it anytime I want. But I greatly enjoy doing it, and I like having the audience a partnership with ESPN gives me, so why would I stop?
How do you make money? And why project your needs in that regard onto others. Certainly you’re not trying to either think for other writers or universalize your personal opinion and experience, are you? Because that is what would be patently absurd. Asked and answered.
“How do you make money?”
By doing things that aren’t writing.
I also wonder what Kos’ reaction would be if he found himself in the same situation as HuffPo. That’s important too, or at least it seems to be to me …
Kos, I believe, actually pays his front pagers. Both at DK and HuffPoo, there is an important distinction between the front page and the “diaries” (or whatever else they are called). Both sites offer front page commentary and news, as well as hosting an area where people can voluntarily post in the hopes of reaching a larger audience. Most of the arguments in favor of HuffPoo have focused on the latter and those against on the former.
So, the act of writing and submitting works of publication for free are only important if the site they are published on makes (a bunch of)money? That’s a very odd stance.
Would it not be more consistent that any writer of any sort should be compensated when they publish to any outlet regardless of that outlet’s monetary balance?
There are two issues going on: First is the lawsuit asking for what is in essence retroactive pay or to share in the fruits of the huge sale of the blog.
Second is the new call for the writers to be paid. If the blog is henceforth going to turn a profit, of course the writers should be paid, if they opt to be. Some may prefer to be sporadic guest writers at no pay.
The amended lawsuit is based on unjust enrichment — the idea that if you make a lot of money off other peoples’ work, you should share the profits with them:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/onmedia/0611/4_join_Huffington_Post_lawsuit.html
This makes sense! The Huffington Post was sold for a HUGE amount of money ($315 million) and the proceeds should be shared with the writers, at least a bit. The lawsuit is only asking for $105 million to be split with ALL the Huff-Po writers, which will not amount to more than $1000 or so per writer. That still leaves Arianna with over $200 million.
I am pretty sure Markos is doing quite well on the revenue side. And the models are nearly identical. Although Arianna has positioned herself as a mainstream site from day 1.
Any that are not being paid. Yog’s Law is wise.
Arianna is neither a Conservative, nor a Liberal, nor a Progressive.
She is what she always was – an opportunist, whose only interest is what benefits Arianna. She saw a place for herself on the left, and, Voila!!!
I stopped reading her blog a long, long time ago, when she started letting some rock-headed Conservatives have space.
Sure, I miss some of the writers, like Reich.
But I’m also not supporting the Chinese sneaker factory of the blogosphere.
I began to be turned off by HuffyPost when she started fluffing Michelle Rhee.
Some of her columnists like Reich, Steve Clemmons, and Robt Kuttner have their own sites and we just have to spend more time searching them out.
I’m sorry, but I kind of have to jump into this. I’m an attorney–information/mental work of a particular kind–but I represent primarily low income individuals, and my loyalties lie with them. More than anything, I want the middle and lower classes to get a fair shake, and I don’t know how they get that. Republicans certainly aren’t committed to providing it, and Democrats are only marginally better. We need a party that actually wants to enact laws that protect consumers and workers, i.e. the middle class, in substantive ways, but that doesn’t exist.
Instead, we have two parties arguing over the best way to manipulate macro-economic factors in order to produce incentives that will ripple through the economy to eventually benefit the middle class. Fuck that, I want a usury law.
On the union side of things, we have seen union membership decline precipitously in the past 50 years, and there doesn’t seem to be any good way to prevent it. Free trade is an obvious cause, but even heavily Democratic states are now pushing laws to limit the rights of unions. It seems like we’re reaching a point where unions are not effective because they have not been effective in the past. If we can’t figure out any way to turn that around, we’re going to have to find a different way to protect the interests of the lower and middle classes.
I think that’s what people are asking when they wonder if unions haven’t outlived their usefulness.
I think this is a big problem for the left in general. In American life, the traditional response to social problems has been to organize, organize, organize. If you look at the major social changes throughout our history, they only come about when large numbers of people join membership organizations that advocate for change on a massive scale. That simple doesn’t happen anymore. A lot of people are happy to sit at home and sign electronic petitions. If you want to change the world are unwilling to get of your couch, you’re not helping.
I realize this is sort of rambling, but this stuff has been bouncing around my head recently and I’m trying to work out some of these thoughts.
Free trade is certainly one important factor in the decline in union membership. Another factor in the 1950s and 1960s is a shift in labor force composition, as working class employment shifted away from mostly unionized blue collar jobs to increasing numbers of traditionally nonunion white collar wage jobs. There was also a dramatic increase in professional and technical labor, neither traditionally union. Since 1980, federal laws pushed by the Republicans have weakened the position of unions and made it harder to organize.
These are complex issues and there are many causes and many people deserve blame.
But in a few sentences–we have to go back to the basics and organize the poorest of the poor. Unions aren’t going pop back to life. Online petitions do nothing. Arguably neither does me sitting here writing about this stuff. We have to rebuild class consciousness in this nation and the world. And that’s going to take decades even if a large group of committed people started pushing for it today.
But how to we rebuild class consciousness? I saw a recent article that basically indicated that in countries with high income inequality, the middle class eventually begins to identify more with the upper class than the lower class, but in countries with greater income equality, everyone feels like they’re in it together. That seems to be the problem we’re having in the US right now. Class consciousness in the US has also always been undermined by racial and ethnic prejudcies, which are again being used against President Obama and against Hispanics. Republicans use complaints about illegal immigration to divide working class whites from working class hispanics and immigrants.
Anyway, if you were to design a program for rebuilding class consciousness, what would it look like?
I would study the 19th century, when it was built the first time. There’s nothing new in what you are describing. Class consciousness in late 19th and early 20th century was largely (though by no means all) driven by organizing immigrant labor, with native-born radicals working with immigrants to create a possibility for a better today and tomorrow. The IWW and various CIO unions were comprised of the immigrants and their children to a greater extent than the AFL unions (despite the fact that Gompers was an immigrant himself) and it was the children of those immigrants that made up the strong labor movement of mid 20th century America.
Of course, it’s far more complicated than this. But perhaps one could make a tenuous argument that the decline of class consciousness in the present is in partially a result of the 1924-65 immigration restriction period, where this fresh supply of working-classes from around the world did not reenergize the nation’s class-based thought. Could be completely wrong about this.
But even if I am, the vast numbers of immigrants from Latin America may be the best hope in organizing today.
superking, without revealing too much, what sort of law do you practice? I do Social Security and dabble in Veteran’s
I’m a legal aid attorney focused on consumer protection and housing.
Re: Building class consciousness in the U.S.
One of the most interesting surveys I’ve seen in the recent past (here?) asked Americans which decile of income they believed they belonged to. The result was that nearly everybody believed they were in the middle 40-60 percent. People in the lowest and next-to-lowest, typically believed they were just under the median, and people in the highest two deciles estimated they were just above the median.
Just to point out a problem you are going to face: I’m as sympathetic to labor as anyone, but whenever I see a phrase like “rebuild class consciousness” I hear echoes of Marxism and have no interest in that. I doubt I’m the only one.
The fact that you and others tune out upon hearing language that is needed regardless of whether it is Marxist or not is a huge problem. As I will argue at some point here, we need an entirely new language of class struggle and a post-Marxist critique of extremist capitalism. That we haven’t even began going down this road is a huge problem. We also need people smarter than I am to begin articulating it.
I disagree that it is needed. My point is that using Marxist cant like “raising class consciousness” should and will raise eyebrows just as if you had said people need to “join the Democrat party” and “examine Second Amendment remedies.” It suggests a questionable ideological foundation.
Given that Marxism has proven over time to be a) wrong, b) inimical to labor and c) hostile to democracy, I think anything along those lines should be avoided.
What we want, or at least what I would like to see, is something along the lines of Scandinavian social democracy. Sweden and Denmark do not strike me as countries with a great amount of “class consciousness”.
What is needed, rather than ideological training, is for us to develop policies that will be in the interest of the poor and working class, to promote those policies, and to find and support candidates who do the same.
“Class struggle” isn’t going to get it done, and that’s a good thing.
Given that
Marxismunregulated capitalism has proven over time to be a) wrong, b) inimical to labor and c) hostile to democracy, I think anything along those lines should be avoided.Fixed. There are plenty of non-Stalinist versions of Marxism, and capitalism does not have a great track record either.
Sweden and Denmark do not strike me as countries with a great amount of “class consciousness”.
If only someone, anyone, had ever asked this question…
I hear echoes of Marxism and have no interest in that
True. There is nothing which dooms an idea to irrelevance like being right.
Does it make you feel better if we couch arguments as Main Street vs. Wall Street? Or workers vs. bankers? Because that is what we’re talking about most of the time. I don’t know that I can talk about class issues without saying the word “class,” but I’ll certainly try if it helps.
I’m not trying to be entirely snarky, here. I take your point that messaging matters. But the real issue is that wealthy and powerful interests have every advantage in our society, and it’s bad for individuals as well as for the country. I would argue, in fact, that our current state is bad for capitalism. I actually believe in capitalism. Both my parents started their own businesses and have been successful in their lives. So, it works. We run into problems when there is capitalism without limits–limits on monopolies, limits on working conditions, limits enforcing fairness and honesty. We know capitalism won’t do this itself. We need government to do it, and if the government doesn’t, then capitalism eventually breaks itself. See, e.g. 2008, which, of course was preceded by the 1920s and 1930s.
The state we are in was created by the political parties, though primarily the Republicans, pushing an ideology that claimed our national identity required the elimination of taxes and regulations, and further that the elimination of those taxes and regulations would created prosperity for the middle and lower classes. This ideology, of course, was designed solely to create the necessary circumstances for the rich to make more money at the expense of the relatively poor. But it won elections, and given the demographics, a lot of poor people were voting for it. They voted for it again in 2010. If there is a way to make it clear that their actual interests don’t align with Wall Street bankers, we need it. Now. And if that is something other than class consciousness, give it a name.
No doubt some of your best friends are labor. Unfortunately, such consciousness does play a role in successful organizing and activism, and the fact that certain phrases make you clutch your pearls doesn’t change that.
Now if you meant to say, “rephrase the concept in such a way that it doesn’t frighten people,” that’s a reasonable position. But I’m not sure you did.
The gay rights movement has been a model of organize-and-things-get-better. Of course organizing still happens and the Kids Today do it.
The problem you’re outlining is that this sort of organizing occurs less and less along class lines, that class consciousness is lacking. I think that’s right, and that’s a really big problem. But the claim that organizing and social change creating isn’t happening is simply false.
Yes, the gay rights movement’s amazing progress over the past decade is the best example that the old organizing models can still be extremely effective.
That’s a fair criticism. I agree with you.
While it’s true union membership has declined, it’s not universally true. I’m a member of the NEA (and the AFT, for that matter, since my local afflilates with both).
The NEA’s membership is not declining. That membership is under attack, though. And the attack is coming both from traditional anti-union interests and young “progressives” who support “education reform” without questioning their assumptions or eventual goals.
I think the argument that unionization has failed is too pat to explain the concerted efforts to both union-bust and to drive down the prestige of certain powerful unions.
I was already boycotting Huff Poo for other reasons, but as a proud fourth generation union man, I support your efforts. Most professionals who do not think that they are “labor” are simply deluding themselves. If you work for a paycheck and do not exercise substantial control , over working conditions, you are labor. I thank my father, an engineer and a Republican, for this insight. After high school, he had been a union machinist until he was drafted in WWII and always said that as an engineer he was simply an overpaid plumber.
No way, Marx! I am an American; I’m a Capitalist. Oops, gotta go. My break’s over.
HuffPo also deserves to a boycott over its medical columns, but I decided to leave that out for the present.
My disdain and conscious attempt over the years to steer clear of HuffPo (it’s close to a boycott) arose from the dodgy, unreproducible “science” and “psychology” front-paged there. Substandard and untrustworthy.
That is one of the reasons I was boycotting them.
Class consciousness and solidarity among young educated people is almost dead in this country.
Worse than that, I think. Class has increasingly been redefined in terms of lifestyle and consumption habits (this started in the 50s, Dwight McDonald et al), and young educated people are in solidarity only with each other.
You might end up with a barista or adjunct making $20,000 a year looking down on a plumber making $40,000 a year based on consumption patterns. The premise is often that the educated young person is only temporarily poor, which is classic American ideology. And countercultures of the educated long-term poor tend not to identify in terms of class issues. (And even though baristas might encounter Mexican prep cooks and dishwashers, there’s no idenbtification with them).
One of the points of Gelman’s book is that the culture war is within the middle class. Poor educated young people tend to identify with their side in the culture wars, and their side in the culture wars is mostly middle class.
That seems somewhat on point, but isn’t it more likely that what you’re describing (and somewhat embodying, frankly) is the pretty normal disconnect between generations, largely because older generations tend to regard younger generations as general n’er-do-wells?
Though I think you’re on to something in round-aboutly noting that there’s a major divide along cultural identity lines that tends to split the working class.
1) Isn’t this the sort of thing that only became a problem in people’s eyes (or an opportunity to cash in) after Arianna sold out to AOL?
2) What level of participation in a blog makes one a “writer” worthy of union protection? I’ve read reviews on Amazon that are far more entertaining than anything I’ve read on HuffPo–do the reviewers deserve a check from Jeff Bezos?
No–Huff Post was critiqued for their exploitative model for at least a year before the AOL buyout. That might have brought the site more attention, but the critique is significantly older.
Does any of this actually matter? If the blogosphere was still as dynamic as it used to be, would that suddenly make the HuffPo model just and fair?
No–but such a model wouldn’t exist either because people could make a legitimate go of it and have a chance to gain a real readership.
That’s a hypothetical that I think is hard to justify.
Kos initiated his diary system way back when … I’m not sure exactly but I know it was in place by late 2003. Armando, Chris Bowers, no doubt others that I’m forgetting got their start by writing those diaries – essentially a business model that you think “wouldn’t exist” in a more dynamic environment.
Perhaps. But in 2003, Chris Bowers could become Chris Bowers doing this. In 2011, that is extraordinarily unlikely.
That’s a non-sequitur though, in so much as you’re basically ignoring the possibility that making HuffPo (or Kos or whomever) pay anyone who generates content for them will primarily result in them being unwilling to publish as much stuff as they do for financial reasons. It’s not like the outlets that do pay for submissions are willing to publish all comers by any means.
What you’re ultimately arguing for is a de facto protection racket for the current, broken, business model.
This is a false choice, but were I to have to choose between the old, broken business model that paid workers a decent wage at giant profitable corporations and a new model that democratized media access at the cost of providing free labor to giant profitable corporations, I would choose the former in a heartbeat.
Again, it’s a false choice because there’s no reason we can’t have a more democratized media and fair compensation.
And I would not, which puts a big hole in your argument for exploitation, unless your contention is that I don’t actually get the enjoyment that I do out of writing for a hobby and having an audience for it.
And what exactly happens when some HuffPo bloggers go on strike but other people fill the void and HuffPo continues to have a steady stream of free content?
This is precisely what I was hinting at.
Erik’s position – and that of the boycotters – seems highly unpersuasive to me. He’s offering writers a choice between being published for no pay or being not published for no pay. And then he’s telling them that “not published” is the way to go because, let’s face it, they’d never make it anyway.
It’s reeks of “I’ve got mine” when coming from a blogger on an estblished site, even though I assume that attitude is unintended.
Um, no. It simply suggests that HuffPo should pay its bloggers a small amount of money based upon the traffic they generate or some such arrangement. The boycott is an economic tool to try and force Huff Po to do that. And since the world of progressive media is fairly small, it is also a tool of social stigma.
But to say that I’m saying “I’ve got mine,” suggests you think that I make enough money writing on the internet to cover my alcohol budget for the month. Which would not be true.
A “small amount of money”? Or a fair amount of money?
Come to think of it, what are the demands here? Will any pittance do? I can’t seem to find anything concrete on this subject using the Google, so if you can help out I’d sincerely appreciate it.
Actually, I wouldn’t guess that it would be. But you do have a platform that a lot of HuffPo contributors would presumably envy and the relative social and potential career enhancement that goes along with it.
Surely you’d acknowledge that you’re in rarified air, relatively speaking.
It’s only the choice between being published and not published at the Huffington Post. Nobody’s going to demand you unionize against yourself on your blogspot site.
Um, what? We’re talking about a HuffPo boycott, right? Isn’t it therefore assumed that we’re talking about being published on HuffPo? What does Blogspot have to do with anything?
Well then it’s a choice between being read or not being read, unless you’re extremely fortunate enough to have your blogspot page get noticed and develop a readership, or to be asked to join a larger blog with an established readership.
I suppose I’m biased by the more obviously mutually beneficial relationships in the baseball blogosphere, but this this is an extremely narrow way of looking at why people write or seek to be published, and will ultimately just serve as a victory for the professional writers who more or less don’t think you have any right to be heard if you haven’t picked up some asshole editor’s dry cleaning as a 25 year old.
So what? You’ve already acknowledged that this has no bearing on whether or not the business model is just.
For the record, my Arabic is terrible.
Shhh…don’t tell anyone
We could start by correcting its inexplicable inclusion on our blogroll…
I would support that. As well as getting it off the Twitter feed.
If you do that, you’ll end up purging blogs that no longer exist, and who knows where it will all end.
Madness. It will end in madness.
Blogrolls exist to establish a blog’s definition of community circa 2005, nothing more.
I too stopped reading HuffPo long ago because of the absolute dreck that got posted there – medical, political, assorted other kinds of woo. So, my boycott is in place.
OTOH, HuffPo is not a monopoly. Just because it is difficult to get readership on my blog does not mean that HuffPo has any obligation to share its readership or its revenue if they allow me to post on their blog. If the writers want to unionize and bargain with Arianna, I say, go for it. I fear that they would be fired en masse but again, that doesn’t prevent them from blogging.
Ultimately the problem would be that it’s difficult to bargain for leverage when there are other equally qualified people willing to do what you do for free. So, corrupt patronage system animating most Op-Ed pages notwithstanding, the only real way to facilitate that would be forbidding anyone to write for free basically anywhere but their own blog.
I know it may be a little dated by now on other political matters, but Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is very good on the importance of labor and unions to healthy democratic politics.
As others have pointed out, not only here but elsewhere, there are plenty of reasons to simply ignore Huffpo without even having to debate the issue of whether or how much its bloggers should get paid. I stopped reading it a long time ago.
On the labor issue, here’s my take. If someone is contributing articles that are edited and posted in what I’d call the “newspaper-style” pages, yeah, I think they should get paid just as if it were a print newspaper or magazine.
But if it’s a case, like DKos, where the site is basically offering a hosting platform for bloggers to pretty much post whatever suits their fancy (and there’s plenty of rubbish in the DKos “diaries”), and where the stuff doesn’t (as a rule) get promoted to the main pages, then I don’t see a case for paying for what is essentially unsolicited content. If Markos isn’t paying diairists when their stuff gets promoted to the front page, he should. I don’t know if he pays any of the regular front-pagers, but no one seems to be complaining over there.
I think I would agree with this. The larger issue for me is that much of the front page content at HuffPoo is produced free for a highly profitable business enterprise. Admittedly, if people like Brien Jackson are willing to volunteer their labor, that is their choice, but it seems to me that a for profit enterprise should be paying for most of its front page content (which I believe Kos does, but I am not sure).
Its not just that Arianna is making money off the site but when HuffPost was bought by AOL a lot of AOL staff were fired so that Arianna and the other people could get her payday.
I don’t think Kos has worked with Briebart to build websites and then sold out his leftwing base. And maybe everyone who develops content for others on the web should get something. I know that Facebook, Google, Amazon, Firedog Lake, Feministe and other sites generate revenue based on the following that they have but and maintaining the servers, software, and paying for bandwidth can be quite expensive. The question then is do the contributors get a fair deal from using services like Google, Pandagon, Womanist Musings, Driftglass, or Facebook.
I thionk that they do but there is nothing wrong with asking the question about compensation for content developers. However the content created nught not be worth that much if its the same thing as 90% of whats on the web just opinion and nothing really new.
I have been boycotting HuffPost for the past three years anyway.
Well, said, Erik, and the same logic can be applied to sites like Pajamas Media and BigBreitbart or Kos, for that matter, et al. Free access to a large audience in exchange for no money in the event you actually hit the roulette wheel and come up lucky on a story.
But…
The thing is, I’m betting the large majority of people who blog at those sites aren’t exactly engaging in journalism per se. They are dutifully copying and linking to other stories.
With any luck, maybe they’re putting some analysis down on a story, or linking it to other stories they’ve read and putting a different perspective on them. Those kinds of stories are the kind I blog about and my “syndicators” appreciate the kind of writing I do.
I don’t get paid. I don’t expect to. Whatever advertising that’s on my site kicks in a few pennies periodically, to be sure, from links that those sites will give me, and that’s OK. I don’t do this for the money or the recognition. I do this because I see something and I have to speak up about it.
I think that a distinction needs to be made between font pagers and the rest. People who routinely appear on the front page and whose work largely drives income for the site deserve to be paid or at least that should be the default. There is also a difference between substantial for profit ventures like those you cite and nonprofit blogs like yours, or even ones like Eschaton which generate relatively modest income.
I also syndicate out to some sites that get much bigger hit counts than I ever will, and front page on those.
Again the issue is not whether some front pagers post there for free to get greater exposure, but whether it is primarily free content which is driving revenues to the site owner.
Tried to read HuffPo once a few years ago, and never went back. I don’t know why anyone would look at it a second time.
I would be more impressed with a call to boycott academia.
I would be more impressed with a call to boycott academia.
Many state legislatures, including mine, seem to be working on that as we speak. Of course that just compounds the problems Eric has mentioned here.
I don’t like HuffPo for a variety of reasons, but it’s on the internet and it’s free. If I know there’s something interesting there, I will read it. If I think something else is interesting there, I will link it and others can read it. (Mind you I think the last thing I linked to or read there was the years-old David Rees demolition of Michael Ignatieff, who is now officially demolished.)
I mean, I expect I will see union-boosting, however hypocritical, at HuffPo, and I don’t expect to see much more than depravity from the various sites LG&M links to when picking on the latest stupid right-wing meme. If you’re gonna boycott for unfair labour practices I’d kinda hope you’re going to boycott right-wing news outlets first.
I don’t understand why Breitbart projects should get links and why Robert Reich writing at HuffPo should not.
If they’re not going to abstain to avoid troll-herpes, they are certainly not going to for the sake of consistent advocacy.
Not only boycott, but call out every douche-pheasant who writes for HuffPo. Like that cockcheese Sam Harris.
I have to disagree with this position 100%. There are plenty of reasons to ignore HuffPo, but this is not one of them. They are a corporation, like many others, that are making money by providing an opportunity for people to generate a community where volunteers generate content for others to consume. This is now a widely used model on the internet and plenty of companies are making money using it. Are we supposed to boycott Amazon because their online reviews provide a clear business advantage over big box stores or other entrants to the market? Please explain what you think the difference is in this case if that is your position. I think this collection of social capital has quite a lot of value and it would be quite unwise to attempt to destroy. Also, do you really wish to hold the position that any activity that someone engages in that generates capital of any form should be opposed if it is not monetarily compensated?
Looking at it from another angle, writing is a niche profession. It’s not going to sustain the middle class of tomorrow. So no, this is not a significant labor issue in my opinion. I am more concerned about whether the journalistic model that we have promotes democratic control of the media. And I’ll take the model that includes lots of voluntary contributors over one where major corporations control all of the content by defining appropriate modes of expression for anyone interested in building a career. Unless you can demonstrate that the HuffPo model is undermining the opportunity for new independent voices to build a career for themselves outside of traditional outlets as occurred in the 2004-06 time frame, I don’t see a reason to oppose it.
You make it sound like a democratic model of media that gives writers voices is incompatible with paying them. No one is talking about giving every writer on Huff Post a $40,000 a year salary with benefits. But they should get some small piece of the pie they help generate through their labor.
And to assume that somehow AOL/HuffPo is not a “major corporation” does not seem particularly accurate. Rather, this is a corporation who has found a new and effective way to exploit labor. We can either demand that large and profitable corporations pay their labor or we can all happily be exploited.
With respect to what was said upthread, the more I think about it the more I do think it’s simply inaccurate to call these writers “labor,” because so far as I know they’re under no writing obligation to get published (say, they’re required to submit at least 5 pieces a week if they want the opportunity to be published) and because they’re literally not getting anything in terms of compensation, meaning they stand to lose nothing if they “quit.”
So what HuffPo is exploiting isn’t “labor,” but a pool of people willing to generate free content for them either for the enjoyment of it or because they feel as though they’re getting some other form of compensation out of the deal.
My understanding is that HuffPo makes money on volume. That is, any of one of these contributors is contributing very little to the bottom line, but there are tons of them and that is how HuffPo is making money. If you could establish that these writers are generating thousands of dollars in revenue each, then I’d be a lot more inclined to support your position. My understanding is that the revenue from your average post or article is so miniscule that nobody would really bother to defend their right to that particular income stream. I could be wrong about this, but that is what I remember from reading about HuffPo’s model.
There are two models I have in my head for looking at this issue. If HuffPo is actually generating significant revenue from each writer that those writers could not generate independently on the internet because of size/reach type issues, then I would support your position and strongly encourage those writers to organize and force HuffPo to give them some compensation for the revenue they are generating for HuffPo.
But if the model is that HuffPo is making money by providing a platform for thousands of contributors to each generate tiny revenue streams that HuffPo captures, I don’t really have a problem with it. And if your idea is that by forcing HuffPo to pick their best contributors, pay them and generate the same revenue by pushing the efforts of that much smaller group of contributors, that’s not an idea I like.
This is not like teaching adjuncts where the university has a legitimate need for all of those teaching services, and based on the tuition students are paying, those adjuncts are probably delivering quite a bit more revenue to the university than they are getting in pay.
And I do believe there is an inconsistency between writers whose careers are built on ascending up through the ranks of some large company and a media environment that expressive a representative set of views. I recognize that is not what you are advocating for, it’s just that I don’t think your model is realistic.
To be fair, do any non-niche labor issues gat any play anymore? Seems the only time unions make it into the news is when one of the professional sports union’s CBA is expiring. I guess Scott Walker and the Wisconsin unions are an exception, but hardly anyone’s noticed similar issues in other states.
Right; there’s this assumption that labor is still thousands of guys working for US Steel, not the professions of far smaller numbers working here and there around an information/service economy. If we only organize professions that are going to “sustain the middle class of tomorrow,” well, what are those professions? To some extent, SEIU and AFSCME have identified these professions and have successfully organized them. But that’s hardly enough to stop the tide of anti-labor from sweeping over all of us, whether we think we are labor or not.
Are we supposed to boycott Amazon because their online reviews provide a clear business advantage over big box stores or other entrants to the market?
Maybe a clear advantage, but a very very small one in the larger Amazon business model. Reviews are not where they make their money.
Uh, guys, it’s not that HuffPo doesn’t pay writers. It does.
It just doesn’t pay all of them.
And the ones who are writing there—instead of on their own blog via blogspot or wordpress or typepad—are doing so voluntarily, presumably because HuffPo gives them more exposure than they would have otherwise.
Now, I readily concede that Bob Reich doesn’t need HuffPo, and shouldn’t give them free labor. Of course, I believe that most of the people who work for free at RenFairs run by an LLC (i.e., most if not all of the RenFairs) are fools, too.
But being foolish doesn’t mean you’re exploited–the people who work RenFairs get free admission (I hope) and the people who blog unpaid for HuffPo get more exposure than they would otherwise. Or at least believe they do.
That they don’t get straight cash doesn’t mean they don’t get value. If they don’t get value, they can quit. (As noted above, this is not indentured servitude; the cost of setting up your own Blogger site is still nil.)
We can quibble whether HuffPo deserves attention. But a boycott because people voluntarily donate their free-time labor when multiple alternatives are available to them is pointless at best.
Encourage them to quit HuffPo. But boycotting the paid people because the unpaid choose not to run what they write solely on their own blog or LJ or DW account is an exercise in self-flagellation, not informed labor economics.
“If they don’t get value, they can quit.”
The precise argument of the Gilded Age capitalist. After all, they can start up their own factories!
But…they can start up their own blogs. Again, this is a really absurd means of arguing the point. The 19th century factory worker couldn’t afford to lose the wages that were supporting his family, however meagerly. It was wage-slavery or death (or both, of course). The HuffPo writer who is getting literally no compensation at all simply has nothing to lose by starting their own blog, other than fewer readers. It’s not like they’re going to starve or be evicted from their shitty tenement if they stop contributing blogs to HuffPo.
So because Gilded Age capitalists made certain arguments, it follows that no one anywhere anyhow has any freedom at all? This is ridiculous.
If you want to argue that writers should band together to get a bigger share of the pie, that’s one thing. But you’re also arguing that people who get paid literally nothing for their work, and who have no reason to believe that they will ever get paid for this work, are being “tricked” into doing so. Academia would be a much better target for this line of attack.
Too bad we can’t measure how high the barriers to entry were then, and compare them to blog-writing! Oh, well.
More seriously, the fact that no one is going to read that Blogger site undermines the argument. Big sites like HuffPo provide the economy of scale that fools writers into thinking it might lead to something. But they all know that their little Blogger site isn’t going to do anything for them in 2011.
“We like your stuff! Let us sell it. If you’re lucky, someone might pay you for it, uh, someday.”
Ok, now we are getting somewhere!
Perhaps we need to move beyond the hand-waving assertions tainted by confirmation bias about blogosphere ossification…
… since that particular argument is a crucial piece in the analogy to Gilded Age labor exploitation. You can see it in action right here, in this exchange. This assertion is being used to rebut other arguments.
I was under the impression that they derive most of their revenue from tabloid nip slips and the like. If they shut down their entire political operation, would they even lose any money?
Speaking as a higher ed person, isn’t this far far worse? With PhDs, we do give a nominal, at best subsistence wage but might also charge a bundle. In many fields, a PhD provides no lifetime wage benefit over a Master’s or even a BSc. It’s brutal, brutal work (of its kind; still better than ditch digging or janitorial work esp. if you’re older, natch). Many people are not cut out for it or for the most direct life it gatekeeps. It kills years of your life.
Does the HuffPost do worse than that? Comparable to that? Is there anyone subsisting or trying to subsist on HuffPost work, or are most of the unpaid writers there treating it as a hobby?
(I’m happy to boycott HuffPost for a multitude of reasons, including this one. Indeed, I generally don’t read it. But the comparison left me a bit bemused.)
It’s the same model of cheap labor, but that doesn’t mean that it requires the same level of commitment (and likely debt) by the laborer. Although if you were to try and make a career writing online, you might spend a tremendous amount of your life writing something no one reads and no one will ever pay for, which is hardly dissimilar to most academics.
I’m not convinced entirely. Consider FaceBook. In some sense it subsists on the free labor (attention, chatting, wall posting) of its members, but it’s not clear that they are labor per se. They could be, of course.
Amazon has people writing reviews for free (I believe). For some people, it’s a service (I get to complain about things). For others, it’s a hobby. For some (professional reviewers), it’s competition.
So, what exactly makes a HuffPost freebie writer (or blogger) labor with respect to the HuffPost? Is it that HuffPost is making promises? Is it the money it makes?
For PhD students, it really is clear: They get hired and are expected to work full time (e.g., here, no more than 20 hrs/wk teaching but, of course, their research gets us papers and grants, etc.).
(I’m, of course, not defending HuffPost, but I want to understand HuffPost vs. Amazon, etc.)
Right, unless there’s some requirement for the amount of work that must be put in or the amount of content that must be generated, calling this “labor” is a real stretch. If people are writing material in their free time of their own volition and sending it to a large site for publishing knowing they won’t be compensated for it, that’s not “labor” in the sense Erik is trying to use the word here.
Of course, I really wish people would organize to benefit themselves in these arrangements. Very few of these platforms require the resources of a big corp to get going, after all. So a co-op seems to be a reasonable possibility.
Especially if he wants to facilely invoke analogies to Gilded Age Robber Barons to rebut criticism.
A quick word for the National Writers Union, mentioned in the first sentence and then largely ignored in the thread. It’s been around for decades, and has been a Local of the UAW for nearly 20 years. (I’ve been a member for about that long, intermittently active though not recently.) There have been issues with the UAW relationship over the years (basically centralization vs local authority), but it has certainly helped the NWU in major, important lawsuits vs New York Times, vs Google, vs AOL. For individuals there is contract advice, a grievance procedure, and other benefits. The website is nwu.org; check it out. /commerical [sic]
Oops, that prior post was me. New machine!
I’ll also repeat what I generally say when organizing discussions come up: The anti-labor viewpoint is deeply embedded throughout society these days and has been for decades.
My mother is my go to example here. She’s the daughter of a union man, but she always is reflexively against labor in any strike. It’s ALWAYS the union’s fault and it’s ALWAYS the greed of the bosses. There’s never been any variance in this that I can recall. Indeed, we always have the same conversation wherein I say, “Well, I understand that the strike is inconveniencing, but there’s two sides that are making it happen right? Management could give in and there’d be no strike.”
That kind of reasoning just doesn’t resonate.
Serious question for you Erik, based on what seem to be two arguments you’re carrying through the thread that seem mutually exclusive to me:
If HuffPo bloggers are getting literally nothing of value from the relationship, how exactly will “quitting” negatively impact their lives in any way?
I noticed the same thing about Erik’s arguments. How can something that provides no value affect you badly if you stop doing it?
This is just another example of liberal hypocricy. They rail against “unfair” labor practices, favor union parasites, say that the purpose of a company isn’t to make a profit but to create welfare jobs–until of course, they’re in a charge of a business themselves. Then they run it like a libertarian.
So, you admit that liberals are right about unfair labor practices, unions and how companies should be run, but are upset when they don’t live up to their princples?
I agree.
My point is liberals never live up to their principles.
Hey, where was your laptop/tablet/smartphone made? I’m guessing it wasn’t union-made, lol.
It’s a Macally iKey, which Google was not informative as to where it was made.
I’d guess either Taiwan, Mexico or South Korea. It’s too bad that it likely wasn’t made by union workers. If you want to try to organize them, you have my firm support.
As opposed to conservatives, who always do.
Unfortunately, those principles are never what conservatives actually say they are.
Presumably, you’ll now forgo every weekend, every vacation, turn in your sick pay, and make your children, if any work, in exchange?
(I could go on, but bandwidth and column space…)
Cuz I can build my own computer, but you’d never get any of those without us union folks.
So we’ll kindly ask you to smile, thank us, and shut up.
Another example of liberal hypocricy:
How much you want to bet that keyboard or touchscreen your typing on was “Made in China” using (oh noes!) “cheap labor”?
How many of you drive Toyyotas and Nissans manufactured in Alabama and Tennessee using “cheap, non-union labor”?
The next Prius factory is going to be in right-to-work Mississippi! Chew on that for a while.
I’ve never owned a car that wasn’t built by the UAW and I never will.
I have owned one that was not built by the UAW in the distant past. It was, however, built by German union labor.
Many BMWs are now made in South Carolina, and VW builds its North American models in Mexico.
Your reading comprehension has not improved in the least. I said:
This was in the late 1970s before any of the foreign car makers opened US plants. It was built by union labor in a country with much stronger worker protections than ours.
VW has been making their NA cars in Mexico since the 60s.
Yeah, well, my NA GTI was assembled last year and its 11th VIN digit is ‘W’, which indicates it was assembled in Wolfsburg.
Is that in Chihuahua or near Mexico City?
Hey amigo,
What makes you think Mexican auto workers aren’t unionized?
Because they are.
Of course they recently opened a plant in the United States, too.
Where, you ask?
Why, right-to-work, low-tax, low-regulation Tennessee!
I can’t decide if “right to work” or “death tax” is the more audacious, Orwellian, right-wing bullshit phrase.
I agree: Obama can learn a lot about how to run an economy from the Germans
By the way, the productivity AND profitability of VW is actually higher in Germany than any plant here in the States, mostly because a) it’s unionized, b) neither the workers nor the employer have to worry about such niggling details as healthcare, and c) it’s a collaborative effort, and the company doesn’t rape the employees to make that one last buck.
I drive a Ford.
A Fiesta or Fusion? Hecho en Mexico, amigo!
Nope. It is an older model and American made (though not all components are on any US auto).
How much you want to bet that keyboard or touchscreen your typing on was “Made in China” using (oh noes!) “cheap labor”?
Can you please point to a union made alternative? It is not hypocrisy if we have no choices. That said, I actively support the efforts to unionize the work forces in Asia where many of the goods sold here are produced.
Why do you suppose that is?
So that the rentier investors and management can extract even higher rents.
The purpose of a corporation is to turn a profit. Unions are a drain on profits (and productivity with their ridiculous work rules and strikes).
You can extend your ‘drain on’ analogy and apply it to some of your spewage.
For all values of “profits”=”rents extracted by rentiers and management.”
Ah, so the right-winger comes out and admits that he cares more for a higher value of GDP than he does for the standard of living for the precise people who made it possible.
Thanks for being honest, psychopath.
Thank you for being so unusually forthright in your worship of the wealthy, RH.
Regardless, if you have the courage of your convictions, you should go on craigslist and sell all your electronics right now, otherwise you’re an evil capitalist exploiter who is oppressing the workers of the world.
If you had the courage of your convictions, you would move to Somalia. Do not be any more absurd than you have to.
And you’d move to North Korea or Cuba.
Why? If his goal is to improve protection for workers, why would he have to move to North Korea or Cuba for that? We have plenty of exploited workers right here in the US.
You, of course, as a self-proclaimed Libertarian care only about yourself and your ability to be free from government. There are options for you to pursue if you seriously want this. The fact that none of you ever, ever, ever choose to live under the conditions created by the policies you advocate tells me all I need to know about the sheer hypocrisy of so-called “libertarians.”
Indeed.
If writers who volunteer to blog for HuffPo are entitled to compensation, why aren’t all of the commenters in this thread entitled to some small amount of money from LGM? Aren’t we voluntarily contributing our writing skills, just like HuffPo writers? Isn’t LGM exploiting us for its own financial gain?
To anticipate one possible objection, I don’t buy that bloggers generate views and commenters don’t. There are sites that I read as much for the comments as for the bloggers. And Nate Silver did a piece a few months back showing that the great majority of HuffPo’s free bloggers are generating very few page views:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/
So what the difference between low-page-view volunteer bloggers and commenters, such that sites must pay the former but not the latter?
Keeping with the same theme, what about frequent/prolific posters on high traffic message boards? Surely they’re needed to drive traffic and they provide free content.
I doubt many message boards are profitable ventures. If anything, the economics of the situation would demand that the people pay to comment.
Not that there aren’t exceptions, but I suspect that this is something of a rhetorical dead-end.
Not many, no, but I would think that some of the largest are, otherwise I don’t see why sites would put up with the hassle of them.
You’re treating a message board as something different from a blog. But it really isn’t, not always anyway. The blog and the comments form a single product which together attract readers.
So when a blog has a message board, they are really one product; and volunteer bloggers must be paid, how come volunteer commenters don’t have to be paid?
If writers who volunteer to blog for HuffPo are entitled to compensation, why aren’t all of the commenters in this thread entitled to some small amount of money from LGM?
I know I’ve been waiting quite a while from my Soros check. The moment the check clears, I will be using the proceeds to open my mandatory gay marriage chapel.
More seriously, we can post without owner permission. But I can’t post to HuffPo’s front page. We are LGM’s guests, in a way that HuffPo writers are not guests. There are a lot of reasons why we are not like the front-pagers of HuffPo.
If a blog says to a blogger, you may post here but we won’t pay you anything, and the blogger agrees, why is he not a guest in the same way as a commenter?
The blog has been completely up front, never promised the blogger anything, and the blogger agreed to the deal. Why isn’t he a guest?
Depends. Is the blog making millions of dollars? Or is the blog making nothing?
If the blog never promised to pay anything, and the the blogger accepted the deal, knowing there was no promise to pay him anything, why does it matter whether the blog is rich or poor?
Is an agreement to work for free for a rich blog somehow less enforceable than an agreement to work for free for a poor blog?
This is leading toward a different law of contracts for rich and poor blogs—do you really want to go there?
This is leading toward a different law of contracts for rich and poor blogs
ITYM “social norm,” not “law of contracts.” Boycotts are not how you get laws changed.
Wow, we really have to parse the hypothetical? It says whatever will test this issue.
Assume the blog makes millions.
Assume that they clearly explain that the individual won’t make money. Ever. Or be promoted. Ever.
Assume everything we need to for it to be a relevant hypothetical, ok?
Now answer the question.
Because I can very well see someone freely contribute their work for just reputation. But no one worked 60 hour weeks in the 1920s for the sexy reputation of being an anonymous sweatshop worker. So the Gilded Age Robber Baron analogy breaks down (in this way as well as others). So facilely invoking it to rebut criticism will need to be abandoned.
This is ridiculous–obviously I wasn’t arguing that the conditions of labor for Huff Post were similar to that of 19th century factories.
But the anti-labor arguments for both remain very similar. And that’s the point of those comparisons–the arguments of those who oppose extending labor rights.
I will (recklessly) assume from your scoffing non-answer of the hypothetical that you are willing to acknowledge forms of compensation in the Internet Age (reputation, maybe even just eyeballs, etc) beyond the strictly monetary considerations of the Industrial Age.
Of course, the obvious next question becomes: how adequate was your treatment of those non-traditional forms of compensation.
Did you really not see that is the obvious next question? Do I really need to hold your hand and lead you over to it and introduce you?
Also, how does it make you feel that GM is rapidly expanding manufacturing–in China!?
So much for the bailout saving the UAW! Soon we’ll be driving made-in-China Chevys for $7,000!
Can we please stop feeding the troll. I don’t want him undermining what has been a valuable discussion of labor and the blogosphere.
Where was your computer made, Erik?
Aw, c’mon dad, it’s fun.
My apologies, it took me about a half-dozen posts to realize the glibber was taking a dump on the discussion.
After lunch, I decided to spend a couple of hours hiking up here. I found that I can have much more intelligent and insightful discussions with the ponderosas and mule ears than with Unreal Upchuck.
[...] Blogging. South Florida Daily Blog links to a CBS piece about blogging and Lawyers, Guns, and Money takes on the Huffington Post about unpaid blogging. The theme running in both pieces is the absolute difficulty behind becoming [...]
Wouldn’t the test of whether we think Arianna’s asshole empire (I haven’t ever read it, but I’ve been purposely not reading it since I found out it was the Internet capital of woo.) is fair or not would be whether anyone ever parlays writing for free there into an actual writing career?
Are there examples of that actually happening?
I don’t think anybody who writes for HuffPost believes that they are going to go from nonentity to full time paid writer. The real question as I see it is whether somebody was able to parlay articles on HuffPost to a blog with far greater readership than before that same person started writing for HuffPost. Many bloggers realize that they aren’t going to make money from their blog but just want to be heard. If that is their goal and if writing without compensation for HuffPost helps them accomplish their goal, then I don’t think it makes sense to make the analogy to the writer as a turn of the century laborer.
Precisely the niche and strength of the HuffPo (and weakness).
Why not contractual agreement?
I can understand some of the problems progressives have in labor markets, but those are usually based on unfair restrictions and coercion out of personal necessity (lots of workers dealing with few employers, workers often suffering far more from economic inactivity than employers). What, in this situation, overrides the simple fact that they agreed to these terms?
What, in this situation, overrides the simple fact that they agreed to these terms?
Minimum wage laws? Misclassification of employees as independent contractors in order to avoid those laws?
Damn you and your pesky facts!
I would not go so far as to call those “facts” – both are complicated issues, and IANAL. But every time I see people working for free, those are the first things that come to mind. That, and Massachusetts’ mandatory triple damages law.
When I see someone working for free, I ask why they haven’t quit or found a more fulfilling use of their time.
Of course, I suppose I could look for ad hoc reasoning for compensation after finding out that another has been able to make their output valuable.
Ah. Since I actually see people being told to work off while the clock fairly frequently, I suppose I will now tell them that I need to stop engaging in ad hoc reasoning, and not point them in the direction of the DoL.
This is not all theory. Plenty of people are required, as a condition of employment, to work for more hours than they are getting paid for. Those employers are breaking the law. They are competing, unfairly and illegally, against employers that don’t. Laws are what give a level playing field.
I agree for the most part and tried to concede as much with my comments about understanding the problem progressives have with some labor markets.
But nothing you said answers the question as to why HuffPo contributors don’t just quit.
As you have ably pointed out, there is no way to judge the fairness of the employment situation until you ask: “Why are you still employed?” because that determines the factors and forces that lead to employment.
The fact that the Huffpo makes money and the contributors do not says nothing about the fairness of the situation.
But nothing you said answers the question as to why HuffPo contributors don’t just quit.
Vague hopes of future compensation.
How is the HuffPo model different from an unpaid internship?
Very little, I suppose, except that I imagine the vast majority of HuffPo contributors did so for personal rather than professional fulfillment.
Of course, I’m not really sure why unpaid internships are bad, either.
I was referring to fairness, not law.
I was referring to fairness, not law.
Oh. I thought you were asking what, in this situation, overrides the simple fact that they agreed to these terms. Because while fairness rarely impedes economic transactions, the law often does.
I understand where you are coming from and can’t really get deep into that as I am not a lawyer. I was commenting on witless’s fairness test. It seemed a little ridiculous and unnecessary.
Well, it seems to me that HuffPo is making a claim – give us free content, and you have a chance to work later for actual money! Now, maybe WC’s use of the word “fair” was unfortunate. But I don’t see why evaluating HiffPo’s claim is a bad idea. Because if not, the compensation that was implied is not being given.
I don’t have much argument with that, albeit I don’t see that claim as a necessary component of the Huffpo’s model.
If that claim is made in bad faith, then there could be a legitimate gripe.
My guess at this point is that that was generally assumed to be true (and encouraged by the HuffPo), but I don’t care enough for either side in this to really try and decipher how much of that was cultivated by HuffPo and how true it is.
An implied promise to compensate is a rather different question. If such a promise exists, HuffPo should comply with it.
But what exactly did HuffPo say that gives rise to the implied promise? I’m seeing a lot of claims on this point, but no one has quoted any actual language.
Without actual language, the implied promise argument probably won’t persuade many people.
Presumably, they haven’t agreed to them in perpetuity.
What, in this situation, overrides the fact that they might well get a better deal if they organized?
If the contributers want to organize and offer their largely mediocre and replaceable output collectively, more power to them.
And if they can do so without being undercut by the thousands of amateur bloggers who are perfectly happy to do it just to get their opinion out there, great for them.
But I believe its the HuffPo’s model that makes their output valuable, and I also believe that there are a lot of folks who would be denied that outlet if HuffPo started to pay contributers. If the union of contributors did bring government or legal intervention against the HuffPo, I would consider it a wrong and a net negative (albeit not much of one, as the HuffPo is high on quantity, low on quality).
What’s the wrong and net negative? Being denied that outlet is only important if there’s some unique value to it, yes? If it’s not much different than a blogger blog, then the existence of Blogger mitigates the shut out. (Assume a contractual closed shop.)
If the union got better conditions for say 30% of the contributers and the rest were not worse off…wouldn’t that be a net good?
And I think their current situation kinda proves that there is some unique value to it.
Since all of their contributors began contributing without compensation, I am forced to assume there is some value to be had above and beyond pure monetary compensation, so it is plainly apparent that the rest would be worse off.
Furthermore, I sincerely doubt that the other 30% would be much better off, as I don’t see the HuffPo having much of a niche to exploit there. What’s a blog to do with a legion of paid amateurish mediocrity?
Since all of their contributors began contributing without compensation, I am forced to assume there is some value to be had above and beyond pure monetary compensation, so it is plainly apparent that the rest would be worse off.
You know, Publish America gets “contributors” as well. Is it “plainly apparent” that forcing PA to change their business model would harm contributors?
If you can show me where the HuffPo has an established history of making false claims and breaching contracts with contributors, then yes.
I don’t see much correlation between the two, and I don’t know of any movement within PublishAmerica to establish collective representation in ongoing negotiations with ownership.
But PA makes misleading claims, not false ones. They write bad (for authors) contracts, but they don’t breach them.
The analogy is that, because of unequal knowledge/power, some actors have a systemic ability to enter into exploitative contracts.
I still haven’t seen where HP makes similarly misleading claims.
This is why I proposed asking why the contributors still contribute. If there is exploitation, there must be some sort of power over them. I still don’t see what is breaking down here to put these bloggers in an exploited position.
How many potential contributors will be denied access to what is a very visible forum by forcing the HuffPo to pay?
The forum is visible, but it’s unclear how visible arbitrary contributers are. (Think Blogger <- highly visible.)
WHOA WHOA WHOA. I *already* know Chinese. Where is the site that will employ me?? (Pardon my I-just-graduated-last-week unemployment panic.)
I think the point was that you have to start your own blog dealing with Chinese issues, which draws on your abilities to read Chinese sources and general expertise on China. The income then would derive for advertising revenues to your site from people who visited to learn from you.
P.S. – Having just graduated my first Ph.D., good luck with the job search (he actually has one doing what he wants to do).
Hey! Me too. Congrats. (About to graduate my second as well.)
I should graduate my second next spring and have a couple more who should make it through the following year, if not sooner. My first was also the third in the department.
Matt Yglesias has repsonded to this post in a way that makes Reality Check look cogent. Erik is a hypocrite because Gary Hart shouldn’t get paid for blogging.
That is an awfully stupid post.
Actually I think it pretty well sums up all of the problems with the boycott position.
1. At base it’s a cynical move by vested economic interests to cut the knees off of a competitor wrapped in progressive rhetoric and ideals.
2. In general, free writing on the internet (or more specifically the low barrier to entry of writing on the internet)has some very positive social value, and a movement to boycott all free writing that isn’t your own blog would significantly reduce that.
3. A good number of the unpaid bloggers at HuffPo, and I would imagine the ones who drive the most traffic, are actually reasonably well known political/media figures and celebrities using it as a forum to get their opinion out or diversify their media platform exposure. Gary Hart isn’t a working class 19th century immigrant being subjected to exploitative wage-slavery at below subsistence level compensation with no alternatives in sight.
Actually, your post pretty well sums up those problems. Yglesias’s is a jumbled mess in which he misrepresents the original post in order to conclude that hey, someone’s got to make a profit off blogging, so it might as well not be the bloggers.
Where is a boycott of all free writing on the Internet that isn’t your own blog? I only see a boycott called for on one specific site owned by Ariana Huffington who just got a pile of money from AOL.
The fact that LGM isn’t (I assume) paying Loomis big money is because it hasn’t got any big money. Ariana does, that’s why she’s objectionable.
Big money!
It wasn’t the writing that got that money, it was the format and model.
Wow–Yglesias really, really, really doesn’t get it.
Matt Yglesias refuses to publicly criticize a potential future employer? Wow, I’m stunned.
Bingo.
I should add that I’ve never really understood what the fuss about either the HuffPo or Yglesias; I’ve found the quality of writing and thought coming from both is somewhere between the Daily Tucker and Sullivan.
This is insane.
TL;DR a lot back up there, but for my money you’re never going to sort out anything about ‘class’ in the USA so long as you keep insisting that wage-labourers constitute a ‘middle class’. Dear old Karl would be spinning in his grave, if he could hear you from over here…
[...] from that “merciless” scab… the sun. Via In These Times and the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, I see that someone forgot to explain to the Newspaper Guild and National Writers Union that [...]
Then why no boycott of online-Porn? Explain that, Progressives. Still taking marching orders from Weiner?
For the same reason there is no boycott of broadcast TV – because the people involved are getting paid?
Icky analogy fail.
Lets go with amateur porn sites then.
You seem to be rather more intimately familiar with online porn sites than I am.
Great post! And you’re a better man than I am, as I sure wouldn’t have the patience to wade through the endless regurgitation of simplistic shibboleths.
I suggest looking to the writers in the entertainment industry, who deal with this sort of propaganda all the time. It’s actually a pretty interesting question how they’ve managed to win the gains they have, which very much refutes the naive idea that nothing can be done. There’s definitely lessons to be learned there. And it’s shameful that so many supposedly progressive bloggers are engaged in writing apologism for corporate exploitation of labor.
Doesn’t the difference seem to be that entertainment industry writers are clearly creating value in their unique writing while most research seems to indicate that any individual blogger creates very little value for HuffPo?
No, I don’t think that’s “the difference”, for many reasons. For example:
1) The writers for HuffPo are clearly creating value, as that’s part of what is being sold for the buy-out. If they weren’t creating value, HuffPo would get rid of them.
2) The exact same arguments have been used against entertainment writers – do it for publicity, can be replaced easily, unequal bargaining between big corp and poor writer is the only legitimate way and what’re you going to do about it, etc.
3) One can run the same small-hence-no-value argument for gags, actor extras, less “creative” writing contexts, and so on.
Yet, despite all of this, there is a union and a system of payment. But that doesn’t seem to factor into people’s considerations to refute a belief that exploitation is somehow the inevitable order of things. I suspect in a comparable future, someone might end up writing “blog writers are clearly creating value in their unique writing …”
1) Someone linked to it upthread, but HuffPo bloggers are providing value as a matter of size. The marginal value of any individual blogger, particularly the no-names, is basically zero.
2)Hey, if they want to organize and try to strike unless they’re compensated then more power to them. I suspect HuffPo will be able to fill the space with someone else or otherwise go on without them though.
3) I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
4) This is the natural order of things so long as there are enough people who consider the audience or whatever else they get from publishing with HuffPo adequate compensation for their writing. And I also categorically reject the idea that this is exploitation.
1) Similar argument – “The marginal value of any individual [worker], particularly the [unskilled], is basically zero.” Yet, unions have at times been able to form and to better working conditions.
2) “I suspect [the big company] will be able to fill the space with someone else or otherwise go on without them though.”
3) Actors “extras” do nothing. They are literally, warm bodies. Yet, they get a fee. This say something about the falsity of the inevitable-exploitation argument.
4) The point is that much net-commentary seems to proceed from the idea that unions can’t exist and enforce payments, to the absurdity of arguing that pay is impossible where it’s in fact been done in similar contexts. It’s really striking that the impulse is to justify and come up with apologism for capital against labor. And there’s disinterest to outright derision of previous labor success.
1) Except it’s not. If I’m a factory, I have to have someone working in it, even if the marginal value of an individual is zero. If I’m HuffPo, I don’t have to publish the amount of submissions I do from no-names who don’t drive much traffic on their own. So I can easily just decide to stop publishing anyone who isn’t worth compensating individually in a way that a factory simply can’t decide it’s not going to have workers.
2) Same basic deal with extras, I’d imagine. They might not do anything or even be particularly skilled, but you still have to have them.
3)Your last bullet point is asinine. I think Yglesias summed up the divide here quite well in his second post on the matter; my assumption is that “HuffPo not using unpaid bloggers” will ultimately not mean “HuffPo paying everyone who contributes” but “HuffPo not publishing these submissions anymore.” Loomis would apparently find that preferable, but I rather doubt that many of them would share that opinion.
1) Again, we can infer there is value for HuffPo in publishing the no-names – millions of dollars in value. They are not being “published” (really, contributing uncompensated labor) out of the goodness of HuffPo’s heart.
2) Same point as #1
3) Again, that’s a frequently seen anti-union , anti-worker ,argument – that anything from minimum-wage to environmental protection, to safety standards won’t achieve the desired effect, but will be bad for business. You can just hear a CEO fulminating “These new attempts to keep workers from being maimed and killed won’t help, they’ll just cause us to shut down the factory and then those workers you supposedly care so much about will be, get this, out of a job. So you really can’t do anything for labor at all, gotcha!” The interesting point is that this is so common, so standard reflexively made, and historically proven so false, that it really should be greeted with intense skepticism, to say the least.
What constitutes labor? And what constitutes gains for that employment? Schools require me to work for credit’s, but not all the work around can afford to hire me so I can get my credit’s. Would I be working unpaid if I worked just for the opportunity to finish my schooling?
Requiring people who have little or no experience be paid for their service when that service is taking a hit for hiring them would give fewer writers a chance at being seen on big name sites. Big name sites wouldn’t exist. Huff Po content has always sucked with a few gems in between, but now that they are paying their writers they have a decent staff of well experienced people. Would Huff Po be a big name in the blogosphere if not for those few gems?
These people wrote for Huff Po because it was a place set up for them to do it while allowing them to do something else to make a living. The owner of Huff Po likely had exceptionally less time making this a place for these people to get started. All with the understanding that they were not going to be paid. But now they deserve it? If this is “progressive” then I’ve always known it by another name, dishonesty.
Mr. Loomis believes only $$ counts.
Mr. Loomis believes only $$ counts.
To be fair here, if we grant that employment exists (and I get that reasonable people can differ on this), then the position that we should look at money exchanges is one held by both Karl Marx and the FLSA.
Mal, I am reluctant to cross swords with you here. I believe that, in the context of Chris’s questions, the employment/compensation dilemma may be viewed as inter-related. (I am trying not to move the goalposts! Feel free to object.)
My primary point is that Mr. Loomis has been a bit facile with his definitions (of employment, of compensation, etc) here, and should be required to affirmatively state that he is only measuring money exchanges. Let’s analyze from there, I’ve got lots of smart things to say! He’s awfully dismissive. Sure, there is a great case to only measure money, but Internet publishing might be breaking a few molds. I guess when you get mentioned by Yglesias, gotta hit that.
(I am not sure I am ready to contradict Marx (hubris), but I hope I could entice someone else into doing so. Jeer9, I love that guy!)
Mr. Loomis is not just advancing his case about labor relations, he is simultaneously arguing that progressives are acting un-progressively. I dispute that.
Etc. (I can quote more if there is any doubt about the tone.)
It is this judging element that motivates me to get all these questionable assumptions firmly stated in pixels, and track when they are used in his argument.
Does my desire to pin this down mean I am a troll? Sigh.
Well, I think the key question is, is this employment? And while it looks an awful lot like employment to me, I’m just not sure.
[...] Post over their policy of not paying the hundreds of amateur bloggers writing for their site, Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money writes: It is almost impossible in 2011 to go from a no one to a big name blogger. The blogosphere [...]
[...] Post over their policy of not paying the hundreds of amateur bloggers writing for their site, Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money writes: It is almost impossible in 2011 to go from a no one to a big name blogger. The blogosphere [...]
[...] workers will ever get a fair deal unless they organize and fight. You either side with them (like Erik Loomis does) or you side with the faceless multinational corporation (like Yglesias does, whether he intends to [...]
This is a very stupid boycott. People do or do not do things for many personal reasons besides the money. And to make the bloggers of the HuffPost part of a pet cause for labor rights is a slap in their face. They are able to make decisions on their own concerning the advantages and disadvantages of providing commentary for HuffPost. I assume many of those who are blogging for them enjoy the audience they receive more than the prospect of getting paid. Particularly since blogging needs not a be a full time job, often only a few hours a week.
I find this boycott to be of poor taste and totally misguided.
Mr. Loomis refuses to acknowledge non-robber-baron forms of compensation.
[...] at Ph.D. Octopus, building off a pair of widely circulated posts from Eric Loomis, calls out Matt Yglesias and the progressive [...]
[...] about the Huffington Post boycott and its broader implications for the blogosphere, I noted that we are long past the time when the blogosphere was the relative meritocracy of the mid 2000s. It is extremely difficult for an individual new to blogging to rise up the totem pole. We mostly [...]
[...] a bit of a kerfuffle involving the Huffington Post not paying many of its bloggers. According to an outraged Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money: [T]he Newspapers Guild and the National Writers Union have called a [...]
I’m on a forced boycott of the Huffington Post. The HuffPost is permanently banning people from all AOL News commenting who express conservative opinions. I know because I’m one of them. A few weeks ago I commented on the gay marriage story in New York. I was respectful and rational but took strong exception to what i perceive to be the destruction of traditional marriage in America. For this I was permanently banned from commentary on any and all AOL news stories by the HuffPost which now controls AOL news. In its stated policies, we are considered “trolls” by the HuffPost simply because we disagree with the left and have the audacity to voice our opinions. This is not the America I grew up in. By all means boycott the HuffPost, but also demand that they allow EQUAL access to their commentary.