Jonathan Tasini has lent his name to another class action lawsuit, and if the last one is any guide, this one will be bitter and protracted and expensive. It may also be successful. New York Times Co. v. Tasini was waged on behalf of freelance authors and made its way up to the US Supreme Court where the authors’ rights were upheld.

This one is on behalf of bloggers, specifically those who posted on Huffington Post.

“HuffPo,” as it is nicknamed, is one of the most successful media sites of the last decade. Its value was concretely recognized when AOL acquired it recently for $315 million.  But the deal soon provoked criticism because the site’s success has been built on the sweat of unpaid bloggers.

Granted that when they originally wrote for HuffPo the bloggers seemed okay with trading a paycheck for a byline. But when they heard about all that money being shelled out for the value that they had added free of charge, they began to grumble.  Those grumbles are now embedded in the claim filed by Tasini representing more than 9,000 bloggers.  They feel that $105 million out of the AOL money – precisely one third of it – should go to them.

We had observed the same thing when we posted Hey, Anybody Can Sell a Company for $315 Mil if They Don’t Pay Their Help

Tasini, whose fearless crusading spirit hearkens back to the days of two-fisted labor organizers, minced no words on the website dedicated to the lawsuit, comparing Huffington to “every Robber Baron CEO” who thinks that “they and only they” should profit while “peons struggle to survive”

Richard Chirgwin, writing in The Register, says “The complaint claims that the HuffPo lured contributors with the promise of exposure, but unjustly gained from them by keeping the income accrued for itself. (This is, of course, an old trick in the publishing game: any hopeful journalist will have been, at some time or other, offered the chance to ‘get exposure’ if they would let publishers use their articles for free, usually on a ‘trial basis’. This means ‘as soon as you ask us to pay you, we’ll stop running your articles’.)” See Writers sue Huffington Post for back pay

Tasini knows all those tricks, having documented them in the celebrated lawsuit that  bears his name.  That suit was born in the dawn of the digital era when magazines and newspaper republished in various digital formats pieces that had appeared in print written by freelance writers. With the Supreme Court’s affirmation he won the case, reaping some $10 million for writers (and $4 million for lawyers!)

Richard Curtis

“We are being played for suckers to feed the beast,” says Anthony De Rosa, a product manager at Reuters. Who does he mean by “we”? He means you. You are the reason Facebook has been valued at $50 billion.  You are the reason Twitter is worth $10 billion.  You are the reason Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million.  These titans were built on cheap or free labor – your labor, the labor of writers so eager for exposure that they will give their work away.

David Carr, writing in the New York Times, calls it “a Tom Sawyer moment.” You’ll recall that Sawyer seduced Huck Finn and other friends into whitewashing a fence by making them feel he was doing them a huge favor. “That’s a bit like how social networks get built.” says Carr.  If Sawyer were doing it today, he would say ‘You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand’.  The technology of a lot of these sites is very seductive, and it lulls you into contributing.”

“We live in a world of Digital Feudalism,” says De Rosa. “The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.”

So, suckers, whose brand have you built?  Facebook‘s? Twitter‘s? Huffington‘s?  Maybe it’s time to start working on your own?

Carr’s At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs will give you a lot to think about – and maybe to get mad about.

Richard Curtis

A few weeks ago after reading a stunning op-ed piece about torture published in the New York Times we were moved to lament how tragic it would be to lose the newspapers and magazines that generate such gems of investigative reporting. There just didn’t seem to be anything remotely comparable being produced in the blogs, even the best of them like Huffington Post. “Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must – find a way to preserve it,” I urged.

Admittedly, that was written more from a pained heart than a clear head. The truth is, magazines and newspapers are being relentlessly driven to desperation by fundamental and inexorable market forces and no plaintive cri de coeur is going to reverse the tide.

Fortunately for us, Arianna Huffington, the website’s founder, is blessed with a clear head. Responding to the crisis in in-depth reportage, she announced that Huffpost in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors will underwrite the work of a number of investigative reporters to the tune of $1.75 million. Huffington said she and the donors were “concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time when the nation’s institutions need to be watched closely.”

She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists.The enterprise will be known as the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, according to an Associated Press report. Some 10 staff journalists, coordinating with freelance writers, will focus their efforts initially on the nation’s economy. Some details of the structure and thinking behind the fund are provided in this statement by Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a senior advisor to the project. And Jeff Jarvis, blogging for The Buzz Machine, beautifully places the project into the media ecosystem, writing:

The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as [Huffington Post's].

The Huffington crossover operation could point the way to a healthy hybrid of traditional and Web reportage. Stories developed by journalists under this plan would undoubtedly be disseminated in print as well as online media, benefiting magazines and newspapers that are hard-pressed to finance long and deep investigations on their own. Look for more signs that the costs of developing those stories will be shared by others as we navigate the crisis in journalism.

Asked about the moribund print media when she appeared on a segment of the popular Morning Joe TV news program, Arianna Huffington said there are “too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.” Her biopsy of investigative journalism shows a lot of healthy tissue, and it’s good to see a bright beam of optimism in this dark time for print media.

RC