Media pay rising? NOT! #HuffPost NOT real journalism

One Caroline Fairchild at the Huffington Post, who must be an actual paid staffer if she's got a HuffPost email account, claims media wages have shown their biggest climb since 2006.

Ahh, but she forgot, or didn't analyze, this the nut graf (emphasis mine):

The job category, which comprises public relations jobs [and] media and communication workers as well as entertainers and performers, saw a 4.6 percent increase in wages, outpacing the national average wage increase of 3.5 percent for the year and far surpassing any wage increases in the industry since 2006. 

Let's be real.

If you worked in an actual media job, your pay remained flat. If you worked in PR, it went up.

As a commenter there notes, a lot of the PR/communications hike was possibly election-related, too.

If you worked in an actual media job, your pay stayed flat — unless your job disappeared.

More refutation of Ms. Fairchild?

In Philly, the owners of the Inquirers and Daily News are threatening to shut BOTH and liquidate if they don't get "major concessions."

Arianna the unethical and illiberal

People who want examples of Arianna Huffington both being unethical and not being that liberal need read no further than this excellent Columbia Journalism Review article. Among its items of note:

1. Andrew Brietbart in at the foundation of HuffPost;
2. Long before plagiarism of newspaper stories, she was sued, back in the U.K., for plagiarism in a Maria Callas bio;
3. Outsourcing coding for the HuffPost website to places like Ukraine and South America;
4. The fact that, for early "pushers" at HuffPost, "stickiness" mattered more than either content quality or design quality.

There is plenty more. There's one more point, on the illiberal side. The bloggers who sued her after the AOL merger should have seen that something like that was the business plan all along. We're in the Net.com world, the next step past dot.com, and probably waiting for a similar bubble to burst.

And, beyond unethical and illiberal, the CJR story also raises the question about how munch she really may not be about "ideas." Her move from the National Review, itself,  isn't indicative of that. David Brock did that, and it's clear he IS a person about "ideas."

But, she had little in the way of deep ideas then or now. Rather, it's about "stickiness," and having people who know more about the web than her make the stickiness happen.

I personally, as a secular humanist and skeptic, have other reason to question her "depth." Her long-term interest in "spirituality" seems to be of the flighty, New Agey variety. If there's a core to her, it probably starts there.

#HuffPost bloggers get #DarwinAward, legal equivalent

A U.S. District judge has dismissed with prejudice (note that) a suit 9,000 bloggers filed against Huffington Post, rejecting their claim to be entitled to a $105 million cut of the pie from the Greek Goddess' merger with AOL.

This is why it's a Darwin Award, legal equivalent. From the story:

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl said "no one forced" the bloggers to repeatedly provide their work with no expectation of being paid, and said they got what they bargained for when their works were published.

"The principles of equity and good conscience do not justify giving the plaintiffs a piece of the purchase price when they never expected to be paid, repeatedly agreed to the same bargain, and went into the arrangement with eyes wide open," the judge wrote.

Koeltl also dismissed claims that AOL materially misled the bloggers about how often their works were being viewed, and how much revenue they were generating. 

Bingo.

To go into more detail.

First, the bloggers were blogging for free before a merger. To riff on Yeshua bar Yusuf's vineyard, you blog for no denarius earlier, you blog for no denarius later.

Second, Arianna had a history of things like plagiarism before the merger. You knew who you were dancing with all along.

Third, before her (fame and finance driven) self-reinvention, she was married to a rich conservative. More "history."

Fourth, from the story, more Drwin Award level stuff:

Jeff Kurzon, a lawyer for the bloggers, said, "We are reviewing the decision and considering our options."

Really? Are you, as a lawyer, too dumb to get the "with prejudice" part of the ruling? Or, are you gambling that a fair chunk of the 9K suing bloggers are that dumb? In that  case YOU are the one who should be sued, Mr. Kurzon.

Per friend Leo Lincourt, there may  be moral issues here, but they were evident before the merger. I think a fair chunk of the bloggers are probaby less idealistic than they claim, perhaps a bit like a fair chunk of OWS supporters who suddenly discovered how evil Wall Street was when it wouldn't hire them.

Fact is, these bloggers have a bit of recourse, at least, still today.

First, how many of you 9K are STILL blogging for HuffPost? STOP IT! You're now part of the problem, not the solution.

Second, take the next step. If you still read any paid blogger on HuffPost, STOP IT! Even if you can't read their particular thoughts anywhere else. 


Third, tell your favorite paid bloggers what you're doing, and why.

An HP takeover? Would Dell buy? Is Yahoo? Would AOL?

The Yahoo rumors were fueled by a leaked email from former CEO Jerry Yang. But, to me, a sale of Hewlett-Packard, with possible spinoff of part of it, makes just as much sense.

It's clear that HP is caught between two stools, and along with all the other disfunctionality of its board, it is in the middle of that being trapped between different visions.

It hired Apotheker, I guess, on the idea that he would make it into more of a business services company, but didn't like how he was doing that. I think it's viable either continuing to go down that road, or going back down the road of personal products, including bringing back the tablets, but not both.

Rather than a self-orchestrated split, a takeover by another company, with one of the two halves being "spun off," makes sense.

Dell has been behind the curve recently, with somewhat bland performance. Adding HP, and primarily to enter the tablet market, then selling other parts of the country, would make sense.

On the business side, I think an Oracle- or Sun-type company would value it less.

Now, back to Yahoo.

Microsoft is only buying it on terms more draconian than before. AOL/Huffington Post would be an intriguing suitor; integrating Yahoo's search with its stable of serf writers could be a smart business move. It would be a way of attempting to do an end run, or run at, Google's pre-eminence in news (or quasi-news) content.

Dear HuffPuff: I agree with the Greek Goddess

"Go on strike," indeed, HuffPuffers.

Now, I do agree that Arianna Huffington is a pseudoliberal, but I'll say it again -- you can always start your own blog if you want to keep vanity blogging, HuffPuffers. Or, if you want to be part of a "network," go apply to one of the Examiner ads on Monster and CareerBuilder. You might make a few pennies a month.

First, note that many of you have been writing promotional content, not editorial content. In other words, SEO spam.

Second, take a look in the mirror at your vanity quotient. If you really believe in it that much, start your own blog and put a PayPal tip jar on it.

More HuffPuff boo-hoo

They're crying again about not getting a cut of Arianna's $350M from AOL.

Actually, one of her paid honchos has it about right. Mario Ruiz, the Senior Vice President of Media Relations at the Huffington Post, said:

"The vast majority of our bloggers understand the value of having a platform that reaches a very large audience. People blog on HuffPost for free for the same reason they go on cable TV shows every night for free – because they are passionate about their ideas, want them to be heard by the largest possible audience, and understand the value that that kind of visibility can bring."

"Our bloggers can choose to write for HuffPost – or not write for HuffPost," he continued. "They can write as often as like they like or as little as they like. It’s both wrong and offensive to insist that HuffPost is exploiting journalists."

It's vanity blogging.

And, as for the Newspaper Guild joining in the moaning? Hey your owners and mine screwed up on the Internet going on 15 years ago. Crying for HuffPuffers won't change that.

And, they irony, and more, is that this story is on a free news aggregator website. Get a fucking clue, Newspaper Guild!

HuffPuff-AOL didn't talk to Google?

HuffPuff-AOL didn't talk to Google?

The Googster is officially tweaking its algorithm to better screen out SEO-driven webpages. And, it went so far as to officially confirm that was the reason:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Web sites or sites that are just not very useful,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting team, wrote in a company blog. “At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

More proof as to the nature of the targets?

Google’s announcement did not mention content farms. But Mr. Cutts has spoken in recent weeks about the problem and said Google was working on algorithm changes to fix it. “In general, there are some content farms that I think it would be fair to call spam, in the sense that the quality is so low-quality that people complain,” he said in a recent interview.

The company said, in that post, this should affect about 12 percent of blog searches. It also said that while this was a U.S.-only change for now, it would get rolled out worldwide, but that was coming soon enough. It also noted that a personal website "blacklist" tool on its Chrome browser, though not used in the algorithm tweaking, said the tweak caught about 85 percent of the most-blocked sites.

It also said that while some content farm shinola might rank high early on, the tweak would cumulatively reward the best sites, and so its effects should become more visible in months ahead.

So, the takeaway for HuffPuff-AOL should be that just because CEO Ted Armstrong used to work at Google Ads, the company will NOT be able to game Google's algorithm. Nor, in light of post-holiday shopping revelations, will a J.C. Penney be able to do that through web parking in the future.

That said, will that actually be the takeaway? I doubt it.

To the investment world public, Armstrong will probably claim that AOL sites (even though eHow) was mentioned in the blog) aren't "content farms." Inside the AOL hive, he'll probably work on a mix of redoubled efforts to game or crack the algorithm, on the one hand, and overwhelm it, and us in general, on the other.

That, in turn, will mean that the poor HuffPuffers, individually, will see their individual posts hidden in an ever-bigger blizzard, thereby denting their vanity. As for the pay-per-piece Demand Media, I'm sure teh Google's tweak will hit you, too.

And, indeed it will. Wired has an excellent in-depth piece on what this likely will, and won't, mean. (It's more pessimistic than the NYT blog about how much or little effect it will have, referencing Google's idea that an algorithm should be "neutral." [Bullshit. If true, you wouldn't tweak it.])

Re Demand:

Demand Media is highly reliant on Google for traffic to its sites and in its filings with the SEC noted that a change in Google’s algorithms could materially affect the company’s prospects.

But on Friday, the company tried to downplay the significance of Google, saying the company was increasingly getting loyal users and traffic via Facebook and Twitter:

“It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business. [O]ur properties are developing into recognizable consumer brands that are delivering real value to an increasingly loyal community.”

And, re Google's "neutral" bullshitting, some day, I may just start using Blekko or something.

A rabbi crossed the line at HuffPost

Or, petard hoisting is still so easy!

I see HuffPost nuttery isn't confined to antivaxxers.

Rabbi Adam Jacobs claims there are no true atheists.

A couple of his comments, with refutation:

. What I have found hard to understand from my new vantage point, however, is why so many of you spend so much time trolling around the comments section of religiously-themed blogs or spend good money to buy billboards on the Jersey Turnpike asserting a negative.

Actually, more of the trolling is by the religious on irreligious blog sites. The billboards assert the positives of not engaging in religious faith.

He then makes the ethical/moral argument for the validity of religious belief, mixed with a cultural one:

To me, however, the crux of the matter is incontrovertible. It is not the product of rational argument, nor expression of faith, but simple historical fact. The faith to which I ascribe has brought substantial light and unique meaning to the world.

OK, this is easy to shoot. First, per a typical monotheist, you must be exclusionist, as you admit. And, much of the world's bloodshed had been over monotheism. That's not just battles between monotheisms, but pogroms, holocausts by them against other groups. Note, dear rabbi, your Yahweh saying that not just the people but even the livestock of the Amalekites needed to be killed.

As for your linked "refutation" of Hume's deflating the argument from design, hand-waving isn't refutation.

And, dear rabbi, that's why we don't troll sites like yours, you're too illogical to bother with argumentation.

Have fun at AOL. Please, don't inflict Talmudic SEO spam on us.

HuffPuffers get a clue

HuffPuff is the collective name for the HuffingtonPost bloggers, the serfs, the galley slaves, feeling out in the cold after the HuffPost/AOL merger.

Well, somebody higher up the blogging food chain than I says the same thing, only with detailed numbers.

Five Thirty Eight blogger Nate Silver says, especially with the merger: You just aren't being viewed.

Specifically:

Another reason, perhaps, that the “slave ship” allegation sometimes sticks to The Huffington Post is because there is a discrepancy between the “250 million unique visitors” that Ms. Huffington pitches her bloggers on , and the much, much smaller number who have any realistic chance of encountering, yet alone reading, any given post. Their median blog post, by our estimate, gets only about 550 page views. That equates to about 1 in every 450,000 of the unique visitors that Ms. Huffington says AOL and The Huffington Post will have each month once they combine forces.

Thanks, Nate, for putting pen to paper and calculating some numbers.

Nate goes on to note that there's plenty of unpaid bloggers at Kos, etc.

So, HuffPuffers, again, if you don't like being unpaid while contributing, in at least a marginal way, to HuffPost SEO hits, then ...

Start your own freaking blog!

Demand Media — what happens with it now?

Yesterday, I wrote my latest blog post about the "serfs" at HuffPost becoming part of AOL and a likely even bigger pile of serfdom, and how that might affect other SEO serfs? What got me started?

I wondered whether Examiner serfs get irritated, apprehensive and anxious to see your parent company advertising all the time for YET MORE WRITERS on Monster and Career Builder.

I asked:

People who would like to use the Internet with less spam: Doesn't the oncoming SEO deluge worry you? What next — "Examiners" from India? The Philippines? Any place where English has reasonable standing as a second language?

Well, what about Demand Media? Is Demand going to be in better shape, since it pays on piecework rather than article hits?

I still can't see how payment is going to go anywhere but down.

The NYT has a good overview on SEO websites and writing for them here. Demand is mentioned in the same breath as some others.

Now, some recent Demand news to indicate why I think it won't be too likely to rise above the SEO crowd.

1. Demand gets spammed ... one of its writers somehow made $7K per month writing articles too shoddy for it, with made-up sources, etc. The person probably was busted only due to the egregiousness of the violations. Some Demand higher-up saw some financials and said, "WTF? There's no way this person could make that much money on our system."

2. A Demand writer exposes its lack of quality control.

Re eHow:

The high quality of topic relevance must be why we see: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different articles on the scintillating and über-complicated topic of peeling a hard boiled egg?

That's why so much content is recycled.

3. Demand also supplied content to corporate blogs — wonder how much it charges for this and how much SEO spamming that generates. Is this increasing or decreasing? How worried should we be about this?

Besides SEO spamming, will the AOLs of the world also do more and more link mining? JC Penney did, and until busted by Google, appears to have profited nicely.

As for my claims that we're due for a tech bubble bursting, CNN has a story on how Demand Media was able to raise $151M in an IPO despite losing nearly $10M last year, $22M in 2009, and countless millions in the years before. It's crazy; these companies are overvalued and someday the piper will be paid.

As for me? Yes, I make a few bucks off the Google ads, and a few bucks off click-throughs. Not much, but it could be more if serf-spammers who write about crap, rather than people who write about ideas and issues, weren't so prevalent on the Net.

But, I started this blog before I was offered the chance for click-through money and before I looked at activating AdSense, which I don't think was even available to me then.

A note to Examiner — and HuffPost/AOL — serfs

Examiner serfs (and a heads-up for HuffPost/Aol serfs): Don't you get irritated, apprehensive and anxious to see your parent company advertising all the time for YET MORE WRITERS?
People who would like to use the Internet with less spam: Doesn't the oncoming SEO deluge worry you? What next — "Examiners" from India? The Philippines? Any place where English has reasonable standing as a second language?

And, whether it's being paid on a piecework basis, like Demand does, or paid on a page hit count/visits, like Examiner and others, I still can't see how payment is going to go anywhere but down.

The NYT has a good overview on SEO websites and writing for them here.

As for my claims that we're due for a tech bubble bursting, CNN has a story on how Demand Media was able to raise $151M in an IPO despite losing nearly $10M last year, $22M in 2009, and countless millions in the years before. It's crazy; these companies are overvalued and someday the piper will be paid.

As for me? Yes, I make a few bucks off the Google ads, and a few bucks off click-throughs. Not much, but it could be more if serf-spammers who write about crap, rather than people who write about ideas and issues, weren't so prevalent on the Net.

But, I started this blog before I was offered the chance for click-through money and before I looked at activating AdSense, which I don't think was even available to me then.

AOL buying HuffPost for $315M — ugh

Really? For $315 million?

Ugh in many ways. Among them:
1. This is surely another case of overvaluing a social media-type company. (I'm convinced we're due for Net Bubble 2.0 to crash in about 4-5 years.)
2. AOL + The Greek Goddess? Isn't this going to be like the wedding of a craptacular failure with a still-to-be-realized craptacular failure?

The story says the money was really just a "finder's fee," if you will, to get Arianna Huffington's alleged genius to AOL.

Well, she's about as overvalued, IMO, as is HuffPost.

Beyond value issues, I dread the idea of a B-grade Oprah now having AOL as a vehicle to "brand" herself.

And, this all said, will the bloggers which produce much of HuffPost's comment for free now want to get paid for their work, if the company is worth $315 million?

Eventually, as more and more people realize that the fragmented Internet doesn't guarantee you 15 minutes of fame any more, the novelty of writing online for the hell of it will wear off for at least some.

Per Business Insider, this move is part of a larger AOL master plan. And, that master plan sounds like it involves even more use of Examiner-type writing serfs, probably more efforts to crack/bollix up Google/Bing/Yahoo search rankings, likely some AOL search engine effort and more.

An example from "The AOL Way":

• AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.
• AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on "the profitability consideration."he documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other "paid media."
• AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.
• In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.
• AOL knows its sites are too dependent on traffic from AOL.com, and it wants its editors to fix the problem by posting more frequently, with more emphasis on getting pageviews.

Some of the topics on that "AOL Way" document make clear it wants to go down some sort of Examiner-type route. So, no, free bloggers at HuffPost, you will NOT get a cut of Arianna's $315 million. That said, it's called WordPress or Blogger. Start your own blog and sign up for Google AdSense. A buck, while working for yourself, isn't that better than zero while working for an ugly corporation?

Salon's Scott Rosenberg has more on this, based on the participants' backgrounds:

Maybe Huffington and Armstrong will prove a great team: The queen of low-cost SEO-driven content paired with the guy who built the Google ad machine that made SEO-driven content pay.

But he goes on to express his doubts:

Fitting in with that? People who think The Greek Goddess is "progressive" (and she really isn't), should note carefully that politics, especially opinion/commentary, will NOT be a big feature with the merger.

Salon spells out the options:

People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn't a part of what she'll be pursuing at AOL. "Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business," says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.

One possibility is, Huffington is just saying what the corporate script requires and actually the plan is to position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News/Drudge -- which I think would be a really interesting move. I have to assume Arianna has big TV ambitions. ...

The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo's numbers weren't looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She'll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000.

So, you serfs who've been writing for free on that issue, you've got yet more reason to quit.

A friend of mine pointed out that AOL's Armstrong has been doing this for a year, already. What he gets from HuffPost? The stable of Examiner/Demand Media serfs he didn't have before. Only thing is, the pay, if any, will be Examinder-style and based solely on blog post hits — no advance money.

So, congrats, HuffPost serfs — you just got sold like cattle. At least it's likely you'll be primarily SEO-gaming entertainment news and consumer tech, and what's left of allegedly political commentary at HuffPost will fade further away.

Dan Lyons also doesn't like it, and compares the HuffPost serfs to Ben-Hur's galley slave compadres.

But, it may not be just blog posts.

One other thing, that will make this even more craptactular? With Memeorandum, etc., now aggregating Tweets, not just blog posts ... I think you can follow all the ways in which that could go. And why stop at Twitter? If Ted Armstrong is really going to go balls to the wall, he's either going to:
1. Work with Facebook;
2. Try to "crack" FB in some way;
3. Work with MySpace;
4. Buy MySpace from Murdoch.

Oh, another question about the HuffPost-AOL merger — will this new conglomerate spam CareerBuilder and Monster with as many help wanted ads as does Examiner?

And, finally, a rhetorical question to people like David Dayen at FDL who touts HuffPost's progressive bona fides — how does a company with a business model like that (not to mention its repeated plagiarism) qualify as "progressive"? In a neolib world, where holding the right positions on one or two social issues qualifies, maybe so.

To any of my media analysis friends, or contacts of theirs (Jay Rosen types), who tout a financier idea of New Media, this is why New Media with big private donor subsidy is just as bad as "old media.' (That said, shock me that Huff Post is the poster child.)

Dan Froomkin pulls no punches at Huff Post

And, it’s good to see. He’s got some in-depth analysis on the likely unveiling of Obama the pushover on national healthcare.

Froomkin to Huff Post – will it work?

Glenn Greenwald rightly says it’s a good move overall, but given the Greek Goddess’ own inside-the-Beltway connections, and Huffington Post’s often bald-faced Obamiac cheerleading, there could be tensions.

Supposedly, Froomkin has full editorial freedom. But, didn’t he have that at the Washington Post, too?

So, I will not hold my breath too long over him and Arianna.

For example, what if the Huff Post starts cheating on “fair use” issues again?

HuffPost hearts Obama stimulus PR vs. ‘old Europe’

No, unlike Don Rumsfeld, Max Bergmann doesn’t actually use that phrase. But, he sure seems to tilt that way.

This is one area where I disagree with Krugman as well. Much of continental Europe wasn’t hit in the same way in the current recession as was the U.S., or the U.K. And, given that the EU pushed BushCo for tighter SEC regulations nearly five years ago, it’s good to see that it won’t buy a pig in a poke from Obama.

Doesn’t the Greek Goddess have the money not to fund plagiarism?

Because that’s the accusation now being made against a new Arianna Huffington/HuffPost spin-off venture.

HuffPost Editor Jonah Peretti says, no, it’s all a big misunderstanding, that HuffPost is just trying to send traffic in the direction of The Onion and alt-weekly Chicago Reader, among others.

Bullshit in spades. Both of those folks are plenty big enough, and at least the The Onion, have had well-established website presences long enogh before Arianna came along, they don’t need HuffPost’s “help.”

Also, people who complain about this and similar shenanigans at HuffPost are getting cybercensored.

I hope the scandal “helps” HuffPost continue to tumble down the stairs of worthwhileness (as it already has), with a good, swift cyberkick in Arianna’s solar plexus.