The lawsuit is an interesting read. I can somewhat see Tasini's point. But as someone who also blogged for HuffPo, I think the fact I agreed to post my articles there (including original content, not just cross-posts), knowing there would be no payment, would make it unfair for me to sue, when I had no expectation of being paid for my articles at the time of submission. That Arianna struck a great deal with AOL, may have as much to do with her business acumen and personality as with the unique contributions of the individual writers.
As the suit points out, HuffPo bloggers aren't volunteers in the true sense, they are "selected" ( a nice word for recruited) and often by Arianna herself who makes a personal pitch to convince them. Tasini blogged willingly for no pay for 5 years, writing 216 articles. Like the majority of HuffPo contributors, writing is not his principal profession (although he's been paid by others to write.) Only after the AOL-Huffpo merger did he decide he should have been paid all those years. Now he wants a piece of the whole pie.
Some people, like Arianna, are destined to succeed in business. Whether it's skill, luck, being in the right place at the right time, or taking a seed of an idea from somewhere and making it one's own through constant nurturing and financial investment, who knows. It's probably a combination.
What I do know is I could never have developed Huffington Post, or made a deal to sell it for $315 million. I'd bet less than a handful of HuffPo contributing bloggers could have pulled off either feat. Why should we be rewarded for her accomplishment?
Tasini is also unhappy that the promised exposure Huffpo offers its writers is amorphous, undefined and not able to be quantified. And, that as HuffPo has taken on more contributors, the opportunity for any individual writer to receive exposure is diminished. On the other hand, he's also unhappy that bloggers' writings stay on HuffPo in perpetuity. And that HuffPo uses search engine opt. to drive readers to its bloggers' posts. Since the last two increase and prolong exposure to Tasini's writings, his complaints seem to cancel each other out.
That being said, I'm not writing for anyone for free these days, except TalkLeft. I haven't written for HuffPo in a long time. One reason might be that other places were willing to pay me for my articles, but I think it was more that HuffPo isn't "just a blog" since the blog posts get picked up by major news outlets. That means my grammar and sentence structure have to be correct. Blogging here at TalkLeft is just writing out my thoughts as I think them, in my own voice. It takes nowhere near the amount of time required to write the same piece for a major media publication. Blogging for others, whether it was HuffPo, or media companies which paid me, became like "work" instead of a hobby. Unless I was fanatically interested in the topic, I just didn't have the energy and time to spend polishing the grammar and tone.
Unlike Tasini, no one at HuffPo ever asked me to tout my articles on FB or Twitter or e-mail them to my contacts. (Nor would I ever do that.) So from an individual standpoint, I doubt I ever drove much traffic to HuffPo. Tasini says he did those things, and assumes others did too, thereby driving a lot of traffic to HuffPo. There are so many individual bloggers on the site, I'm not convinced any individual one has particular value from a traffic-driving perspective. Rather, or at least it seems to me, that the site's overall concept of being a place where readers can go to read a multitude of interesting writers, including some household names, is what drives the traffic.
In life, it's often the "other guy" who capitalizes on an idea to make the big bucks. Entrepreneurship takes a lot of effort and it's risky. It's never been my goal and is probably beyond my skill set. Arianna has those skills and the drive to use them successfully. On a daily basis, I'd bet she puts the same passion and energy into HuffPo that I put into my day job. Asking her for a slice of the Huffpo pie, after the fact, because of the size of the deal she was able to make with AOL, just seems wrong. The time to ask a publisher for money is before you write the piece.
Huffpo writers are not, as Tasini says, slaves on a master's plantation. They are willing participants in a publishing model that makes no sense for professional writers. If writing is your livelihood, why would you write for free, or for the promise of nebulous "exposure?"
It will be interesting to see how many HuffPo bloggers join Tasini's class action, whether any "opt out" of the class, and whether its legal basis, "unjust enrichment" has any legs once the summary judgment motions start flying.
