Journalism union The Newspaper Guild doesn’t like the fact that non-journalist rubes have have exercised their right of free association and contract when agreeing to write for HuffPo, for free.
Guild organizer Lauri Lebo said this:
“People write for free with the idea that they can get this mass exposure,” she said. “As for The Huffington Post, their success was built on the backs of unpaid labor. They’re exploiting these journalists who still passionately believe in journalism and believed their exposure in The Huffington Post would move them forward.”
Now I have some personal interest in this as a paid freelance writer for Noisecreep, which is currently owned by HuffPo/AOL, but that is secondary to this story. The Guild is upset that the hopes of these “citizen journalists” have been dashed, which is apparently HuffPo’s fault. If there was some breach of contract then they have a case, but there’s no way a business would or could guarantee someone can “move forward” — unless they are coerced by law to promote all those scary, unwashed, uneducated people with Internet access. The real crime, besides the forced class warfare rhetoric, is that the Guild just doesn’t like unpaid rubes stepping on their hallowed grounds, taking “their” work and possibly producing articles that are just as good.
It’s interesting that Lebo would say this, since writing for free is how 99.8% off all blogs are existing in the first place. This leads me to believe that this is not really about unpaid labor but more about a union power grab.
My prediction is that if HuffPo is forced to pay their writers we’ll see something akin to what happens with minimum wage laws and “fair trade” plans. Their ad rates will have to rise to pay everyone (in which case the poorer business will get less exposure or have to raise their consumer prices to compensate), or, more likely, HuffPo will hire the more popular unpaids and let go of the rest. The most “unqualified” and less experienced writers — probably students, interns, career-changers — will have one less (very huge) outlet to gain recognition and to stage actual, material advancement. The bottom few rungs of the ladder will have been smashed away, leaving behind those that the lawmakers purport to help.