When the Huffington Post launched in 2005, I wondered, “What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?” On launch day, Many of the celebrities-turned-writers wrote initial entries that amounted to, “My homework assignment was to post a blog entry… how does this work?”
Huffington is now $315 million richer, and her blog network (made up mostly of content contributed by volunteers) is part of AOL.
Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp.
But the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we’re going to take it back.
We’ll stop going to her site. And we’ll stop blogging for her too
via Huff & Puff It Down | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters.