As a blogger myself, in case you hadn’t noticed I was one, I am passionate about blogging, what it represents, and how it has invigorated both the Internet and journalism. However, bloggers are often unpaid and undervalued, the part they play in modern society being completely eviscerated.

Blogging has gone from being very niche to very mainstream in a very short space of time. If I told someone I was a blogger a few years ago I’d often get looked at as if I’d made the word up, but now most people know what blogging is, and a lot of them are even doing it themselves.

There are, obviously, different types of blogging – for yourself or for a company, personal or professional, paid or unpaid. But these different types of output have started to merge recently, with bloggers being asked to write professional content for other people without compensation, which I guess makes you an unpaid professional blogger or something equally convoluted.

One of the biggest Web sites which has managed to build huge traffic on the back of unpaid writers is The Huffington Post, a politics and news blog run by Arianna Huffington. According to AdAge, Huffington is soon to be awarded the Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. So, a school which trains journalists is rewarding someone who expects journalists to work for free.

Part of a statement issued by Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham reads:

Arianna Huffington was ahead of the curve with HuffPo. She embraced the use of new media but never forgot that no matter where or how you tell the story, content is still king. This is what we teach our students.

Content may well be king but it feels so wrong to me that the content on The Huffington Post is obtained for free by luring writers with promises of “visibility, promotion and distribution.” Sure, it cannot harm your career to have an article published on the site, something which I’m unlikely now ever to manage after writing this article, but there should surely be some monetary compensation for the writers involved.

Lest we forget that Huffington and the people behind the site aren’t doing this for anything as measly as “visibility, promotion and distribution,” they’re doing it for cold, hard cash. And with the site thought to be already breaking even and estimated to be worth around $200 million, The Huffington Post is hardly struggling.

Arianna Huffington deserves a lot of credit for what she has achieved, and if a journalism school wants to give her an award then that’s up to them. But I will never agree with The Huffington Post’s policy of not paying its writers for the work, and it is work, that they’re putting in to the site to make it successful.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 11:56 pm under Blogosphere, Internet, Legal, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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