“I read this article with extreme interest as I work on the business at AOL. I found it rather amusing. It may not be fair that Huffington Post is having an impact on the availability of paid journalism work but then again life isn’t fair. Shit happens: workers in the UK construction trade are undercut by Polish migrants, middle men in the music industry are no longer supported in the digital age. 

My point is that the commercial landscape and people’s tastes are constantly evolving, you have to adapt, move with it and think of alternative revenue stream. Non-user generated content businesses are very costly to run. I commend Arianna Huffington for coming up with such a great idea. I wish I had come up with it (and had her contact book) as I would be many millions richer. After all, no one is holding a shotgun to your head and forcing you to write for the Huffington Post for free!” 

It was almost inevitable that my post about The Huffington Post and its sweatshop, #judasgoat ethics would draw some loyalists from the cult of Arianna into the comments. It was a sticky honey trap for converts who have bought into The Huff’s ‘revenue generating’ genius. The comment above is from someone within AOL who didn’t feel the need put their real name. A few people told me the last post was a rant. Well, as Bachman Turner Overdrive so memorably put it: you ain’t seen nothing yet. 

Let’s take Ms A.N.Otheraolemployee’s comment piece by piece. First – “I work on the business side at AOL.” So here we have someone who receives a wage from a company which pays her for her labour explaining that while she believes she should be ‘remunerated’ for her work, writers should learn that “life isn’t fair” and that our efforts are worth only the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket Of Shimmering Bullshit that is exposure from the Huffington Post’s beneficent rulers. 

Next we’re onto that “UK construction workers vs Polish migrants” analogy. Ignoring the fact that it’s the kind of black and white example Daily Mail erections are made of, it doesn’t work. Otheraolemployee’s point is that Polish workers were willing to offer their labour for less than UK employees and that journalism is much the same. The key difference is that the Polish workers were still paid for their labour rather than totally distorting the market by just rocking up and doing the plastering in the hope of some exposure. 

The second comparison is to the music industry which is apparently entirely free from time-wasting, money-sucking, flabby middlemen clinging to its mid-rift like excess skin highlighted in a Heat magazine circle of shame. The music industry has gone through a Revenge Of The Sith-style massacre but in my short time working on Q I sure as hell saw a legion of spare parts still rattling their way around that industry. 

Ultimately the ‘middlemen’ analogy doesn’t work either because writers aren’t middlemen in publishing. Without words there’s no chewy nougat centre to wrap all that tasty advertising around. Without words, business bods would have nothing to sell beyond their sparkling personalities and inane chatter about the upholstery in their new car and what’s been happening with mortgage rates recently.

The reason “non-user generated content businesses” (shudder) cost more to run is because truly good words, pictures, videos and sounds (fuck  ‘content’) required passion, knowledge and experience. 

As for the notion that people’s tastes have changed, well, that’s also wrong. The change in tastes is not that readers suddenly don’t want great writing, it’s that they don’t want to pay. Check Twitter or Facebook to see how often articles from the Huffington Post get shared compared to interesting stuff from Boing Boing, Wired, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and many other places. All those outlets pay their writers. 

The problem journalism has is not that people no longer want to read excellent writing but that they have been conditioned to believe that writing is free, that it doesn’t require time, effort and dedication to make it great. Things needn’t stay that way. iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad show people will pay for things they like if it’s made easy for them to get. There are solutions other than accepting that everything is worthless.

Creating a vast Vichy State like the Huffington Post full of quisling editors asking writers to collaborate in working for free to appease the demands of an audience that wants pap is no answer. Sure it’ll make more money for AOL and the sainted Arianna Huffington but it’ll also mean we have less great writers telling amazing stories.

Brilliant sites like Letters of Note regularly flag up amazing artifacts from writers we revere from days past. In a Huffington Future, we’ll just be picking over galleries of a Kardasian’s arse in different jeans. 

No one is putting a shotgun to my head and making me write for the Huffington Post as the mysterious lady says but I’m also quite within my rights to say how fundamentally damaging its business model is.

And yes I can promote myself in other ways and yes I should pitch my writing to people who pay, write a screenplay and find other ‘revenue streams’. I am doing all those things but I’m also going to stand up and say what I think about the sad and shoddy direction the Huffington Post is taking journalism in. 

Read the other comments beneath the last post, especially the one from another former AOL employee who says “Arianna and her arguments against paying writers made me feel queasy”, and you’ll see I’m not alone in my distaste for the HuffPo brand and it’s philosophy. Words have value. If you sell ads around them and use them to get eyeballs to look at your ads, you are explicitly admitting that. 

If your business makes money, as AOL’s does, then some of that ‘revenue’ you generate should be shared with those whose work helps create it. Your paying the people who are on ‘the business side’ to make their Powerpoint presentations and rightly so but leaving writers out in the cold is exploitation, however much you make them believe exposure will keep them warm. 

Arianna Huffington is a woman guilty of hypocrisy so towering that it could stomp through a model Toyko to do battle with Godzilla. While she pops up at lavishly catered conferences to talk about issues of poverty and inequality, the brand that bares her name is powered by getting people who are earning a wage to persuade others to produce work for nothing. 

Whenever someone wants to evoke the moral ambivalence of marketing or the classic celebrity tumbling, stumbling rush towards adverts when money is dangled before them, Bill Hicks is the go-to guy to quote. It’s a crushing cliche I’ve run headlong towards at least three times recently on this very blog.

When it comes to the question of people being asked to give away work for free, they invoke this video of Harlan Ellison. It too is becoming a cliche but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. “Everyone else might be an asshole, but I’m not…”