Simon Dumenco at Advertising Age calls it "the Award for Most Bitterly Ironic Media Award," and he bestows it upon the Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award, of Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, for giving itself to Arianna Huffington:
Really, the school -- which exists to train journalists -- should know better than to honor a woman who thinks journalists should work for free!
Funny how the fact that The Huffington Post fails to pay most of its bloggers didn't come up when Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham gushed about the blog mistress in a prepared statement: "Arianna Huffington was ahead of the curve with HuffPo. She embraced the use of new media but never forgot that no matter where or how you tell the story, content is still king. This is what we teach our students."
Oh, give me a break! Content, in Arianna's world, is not king, and it never was. Link bait is king; opportunism is king. If content was really honored at The Huffington Post, the site wouldn't have gotten in trouble last December for lifting content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content. (In case you missed the scandal, HuffPo's Chicago outpost got caught red-handed stealing detailed, bylined capsule concert previews -- not just quoting them but copying them in their entirety -- from the likes of the Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago. See "Arianna Huffington's Scuzzy Copying Pisses Off Chicagoans" on Gawker.)
I've been raging about HuffPo's devaluation of content -- and, ergo, content creators -- since late 2007, when HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer told USA Today the company had no plans to ever pay its bloggers: "That's not our financial model. We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company."
Amen.
Leave a comment