HuffPost Contributor Platform

» see huffingtonpost.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

At the end there were roughly a hundred thousand people who could publish on HuffPost without an editor reading it first. That access was the design, and it was the single largest reason the site grew the way it did.

The Huffington Post launched on 9 May 2005 as a group blog with Arianna Huffington's address book attached to it. The invited names were the pitch: actors, senators, academics, and a long tail of people who had been on television once, all filing short posts for no money on the theory that the audience was the payment. Then it scaled past the address book. The platform opened to applications and eventually to more or less anybody, and by the mid-2010s a HuffPost contributor account was a thing a person could simply possess.

AOL bought the company for $315 million in February 2011. The free-labor arrangement that generated the traffic AOL was paying for had already become the part of HuffPost that outsiders argued about hardest, and it stayed in place for another seven years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bargain ~

The deal was explicit and never concealed. You wrote, HuffPost published, nobody paid you, and in exchange your name sat on a site with enormous reach where the post could be linked from anywhere. For a consultant or an author with a book out, that was a real trade. For a working journalist watching rates fall across the whole industry, it accelerated the fall, because an outlet that can fill a section for nothing has little reason to buy one.

A HuffPost byline was never currency where I was working. It bought attention inside American media and nothing whatsoever in the Turkish engineering job market, so the thing the platform was offering had no exchange rate for me. What traveled was the format. By the middle of the decade every ambitious site in every language had a contributor program, and the people filling them were doing it for the same non-payment.

~ the lawsuit ~

On 12 April 2011, two months after the AOL deal closed, Jonathan Tasini sued AOL, HuffPost and its two co-founders for $105 million on behalf of some 9,000 unpaid bloggers. Tasini arrived with standing: a union organizer, and the named plaintiff in New York Times Co. v. Tasini, the 2001 Supreme Court case that settled freelancers' rights over electronic reuse of their work. The 2005 invitation to blog had come from Arianna Huffington personally, and 216 posts followed it.

The case was thrown out. The reasoning was that the plaintiffs had repeatedly accepted the same terms and had gone into the arrangement with their eyes open, so equity gave them no claim on the purchase price. That is hard to argue with as law. The platform itself carried on unchanged until 2018.

~ what replaced it ~

The announcement landed on 18 January 2018 and took effect immediately. Lydia Polgreen, who had come from the New York Times thirteen months earlier as editor-in-chief, wrote that open platforms which once looked radically democratizing now threatened to undermine democracy under the daily volume of false information everyone was facing. Submissions stopped that day.

Two things took the slot. HuffPost Opinion ran commissioned and edited commentary, HuffPost Personal ran first-person essays, and both came with payment and an editor attached. The number of people who could publish on HuffPost went from a hundred thousand down to a number you could staff. The old contributor posts are still online. The form that published them is gone.

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