The bloggers' revolt
Employees of the American Huffington Post, sold to AOL in February, are demanding $105 million in compensation. The site's founder, Arianna Huffington, became a millionaire through the project.
247 – The jovial news portal Huffington Post has always championed the collaborative, or “free,” mode of information. The site was founded in 2005 by Arianna Huffington, who became a millionaire with the project, fueled by content from bloggers. After the publication was sold to the giant AOL in February for €231 million, the writers who made their texts available to the site are seeking legal action to recover payments they never received: US$105 million. This figure represents one-third of the deal made with AOL.
The person responsible for the lawsuit – against the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, and AOL – which went to federal court in Manhattan this Tuesday, is Jonathan Tasini, one of the six thousand bloggers who collaborated with the portal without charging a cent for it. A journalist and activist, Tasini is remembered for having filed a lawsuit against The New York Times a decade ago, defending the copyright of freelance journalists. At the time, the case went to the Supreme Court of the United States.
When AOL bought the portal, it acquired the names of all the blogs that collaborated with Huffington Post, which functions as a news aggregator. The activist – who has collaborated with the site since 2005 – states that the portal would be nothing without the content of bloggers like himself. With this action, Tasini seeks a way to guarantee a means of survival for bloggers who freely make their content available.
In a press conference attended by Forbes blogger Jeff Bercovici, Tasini expressed his outrage. “In my view, the Huffington Post bloggers have become modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation,” he stated, according to Bercovici. “She wants to steal the tens of millions of dollars she has harvested from the hard work of these bloggers. All of this could have been avoided if Arianna Huffington hadn’t acted like owners of companies such as Walmart, who basically say, ‘Screw you all, this is my money’,” he added.
This is not the first time AOL has run into trouble with labor rights. In 1999, two volunteers who worked as moderators in the site's chat rooms claimed they were being used as regular employees, violating the American employment justice act, and sued the company. The case was settled for US$15 million in favor of the volunteers.