Tag Archives: newspaper guild

Huffington Post: Exploitation claim is ‘wrong and offensive’

The Huffington Post has defended its policy of not paying for contributors’ blog posts, after the Newspaper Guild in the US accused the site of exploiting freelance journalists.

The guild launched a campaign following the site’s sale to AOL for $315m earlier this month, calling on Huffington to share a portion of the sale proceeds with contributors, because she had built a successful media empire based on unpaid work.

In an email seen by Poynter, the Huffington Post’s head of media relations Mario Ruiz responds: “It’s both wrong and offensive to insist that HuffPost is exploiting journalists.”

Ruiz wrote: “HuffPost has 143 editors, writers, and reporters on our edit team. But we feel there’s a critical distinction between our editors and reporters and the people who contribute to our group blog.

“While we pay our editors and reporters, we don’t pay for the opinion pieces submitted by our thousands of bloggers. The vast majority of our bloggers understand the value of having a platform that reaches a very large audience.

“They can write as often as like they like or as little as they like.”

BusinessInsider.com: New York Times newsroom layoffs ‘looming’

Silicon Valley Insider editor, Nicholas Carlson, comments on the possibility of cuts at the New York Times [Thursday April 2].

“The New York Times says it will lay off 70 people from its newsroom if employees who belong to the Newspaper Guild don’t agree to take pay cuts.

“We expect the Guild, which met with Times management yesterday [Wednesday], to make all the necessary concessions.”

Full story at this link…