Starting this rather than taking another one off-topic. In another thread, jrootham wrote this:
Toe, you know about the Huffington Post boycott, don't you?
with a link that goes to a post at
Lawyers, Gun$ and Money that includes this:
I refuse to read anything at HuffPo or to link there. Ultimately, HuffPo is surviving on the adjunct model. Like higher education with its hordes of PhDs with no job prospects, there is a huge supply of writers who want to make a living in journalism. HuffPo offers the promise of gaining valuable experience and readership so that someday, maybe, you can make it big.
Firstly, I wanted to add that whatever HuffPo is doing, they're doing it consciously. When they opened their Canadian branch recently, I got an email invitation to blog there as did at least one of my co-bloggers. I think I treated it like spam because I can't find it now. But somebody did enough homework to build a mailing list and try and do a little recruiting. I have no intention of blogging for them. I was aware of the union actions but hadn't realized there was a concerted campaign to avoid reading or linking.
In the same vein, it was interesting to see the cattle call from the
Toronto Star for "community correspondents" for the duration of the official provincial election campaign. I wrote about that and had my post linked from everywhere in sight and that's exactly the angle people wanted to talk about - they want free content but they're in business to make money.
