Writers sue Huffington Post for back pay

I'd be pissed off too, if I was one of the bloggers.

But then again, nobody forced them to post there. And whoever wrote the T&Cs certainly thought of a way to protect the site from this.

This is going to be VERY interesting.

whatever the merits of this case...

...I won't be sad to see HuffPo whacked down. I completely lost respect for (and any trust in) them during the Egypt protests. Right after Mubarak cut off net access and smacked down local TV, in what was widely termed a 'blackout', Huffington ran a breathless article titled, "US blacks out Al Jazeera". That sounded pretty serious - was the US government doing exactly the same thing as Mubarak?

Well, if all you read was the headline and the first paragraph, that's what you'd think. But it turns out that they were referring to the small number of cable companies offering the channel outside major metro areas.

So for HuffPo, "no demand for Al Jazeera on cable in Nowhere Gulch, Montana" is the same thing as "US government orders censorship of TV news channel".

Their disingenouous tactic worked - most of the article comments wrote as if the gov't was indeed censoring - and I'm sure they ratcheted up reader loyalty a few notches. But I don't have any time for a "news" organization that makes Fox look like NPR.

With friends like these...

Get over it...

As a journalist for 30 yrs, in the beginning I wrote for free to get exposure. My stuff was good enough to attract new business, so I prospered. Many bloggers I read these days should not be paid, their crap is so puerile.

Litigation is the last weapon of the talentless, lazy hack.

did I imagine things or...

is Huffington Post supposed to be a lefty thingy? Not that I care to follow them*, or Fox.

If so, "do as I say, not as I do".

How much would it have cost them to send all those bloggers a $2K thank you check? 18mil, out of 345.

* (from wiki)

"Dana Ullman, a notorious homeopathy apologist, actually has a regular blog over at HuffPo."

Pretty lamo, that.

Idiot freeloaders

Can't say I'm a big reader of Huff but I hope they countersue over this frivolous lawsuit.

The authors gave freely without expecting payment.

It was mutually beneficial the site got content allowing them to build readers and ad revenue ultimately leading to a sale of the site for large sum of money.

The writers got far bigger exposure than they could of on their own.

I would imagine this then leads to increased readership on their own blog. Well that's the theory anyway probably didn't work for all of them depends on how interesting the writing.

Just because the website got sold for a nice chunk does not entitle them to a piece of the pie. No case to answer as far as I can see (IANAL).

Unless the Huffington Post has been scraping blogs with permission and passing the stories off as their own I don't see the reason to sue.

I for one welcome...

...our new royalty-earning commentards

Careful now

A company I worked for used to write a regular piece for a trade magazine. This was put together in an hour or so by somebody in the sales office.

The MD, without consulting anyone, decided that this person's time should be paid for, and sent an invoice with the next piece.

The magazine responded by sending the company a proforma invoice for their "advertisement".

End of trial period, start of blog

The authors of Huffington Post's articles might have given their work for free during a trial period, and there might have been a date given for the trial period to end and an option to extend that.

If the judge decides that the trial was not extended by the author, and if Huffington Post acted in a way which would indicate that they knew they should be paying the authors but didnt', then the case could be decided in the favour of the authors.

Anyway, why should any of these writers continue writing for the Huffington Post; especially if they feel that the Huffington Post has lost its way?

Maybe they write stuff of such good quality that they could still get a lot of exposure for their work on their own blogs.

The lawsuit will get settled out of court...

MyHeadIsSpinning conjectures that there may have been a contract in place where the works were submitted for free under a trial period and then later at the end of the trial period the writers would be compensated if Huffington continued to use their works. Nice idea, but I doubt such a contract exists.

While many will shoot from the hip, there's some merit to the lawsuit.

Did the Authors submit works unsolicited or did Huffington Post solicit work from authors with the initial promise of exposure and the potential for later remuneration?

I believe that this is the allegation. The lawsuit could be arguing that their works created value for Huffington while Huffington failed to honor their implied agreement for the 'later remuneration'.

Lets be clear, the value of Huffington is in the content and not in the website itself. This is where there is merit to the lawsuit. One could argue that Huffington has the perfect business model. It finds 'volunteers' to generate content so that their only investment is in creating the site, getting it hosted and recovering their start up costs via ad sales, then sell out to a larger fish.

However on the flip side, if the agreement was that Huffington would merely give exposure to the authors so that they could find gainful work elsewhere, then the lawsuit is sour grapes. Contractually if there was no promise (written or verbal) of future remuneration, then the case doesn't hold water.

That would be the first thing to come out in discovery. Huffington and AOL don't want this to go to trial because it could be used to set an expensive precedent.