Monday, February 14, 2011

"The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post"

After the election season, my regular visits to FiveThirtyEight tapered off then simply came to a stop.

That might have been a mistake on my part.

(thanks again to Felix Salmon)

1 comment:

  1. If the Huffington Post really had built up its empire on the backs of uncompensated writers, it would be like AOL, which recently settled a decade-long class action lawsuit against former volunteers:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

    AOL was assigning shifts to volunteers - and back-end administrative work, and technical support work - as well as requiring that they follow strict top-down guidelines for the enforcement of community standards. In other words, it really was outsourcing the real work of the company.

    The analogy I used when I was handling some of the documents in that case was the "camera" Terry Pratchett described in his Discworld series: a technology company on the outside, but on the inside, lots of tiny demons painting pictures.

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