THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Arianna Huffington faces a large lawsuit from unpaid contributors who claim The Huffington Post, recently acquired by AOL for $315 million, treated them like ‘modern day slaves’.
A group of angry bloggers, being led by freelance journalist and trade unionist Jonathan Tasini, filed the class action in New York federal court, after Huffington sold her internet newspaper in February for $315m without paying contributors a penny.
Tasini, who wrote more than 250 posts for The Huffington Post on an unpaid basis leading up to the site’s sale, said: “Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffingtons’s plantation”. He said he was suing because “people who create content…have to be compensated” for their work.
The complainant and his lawyers believe that bloggers’ articles helped contribute to approximately a third of the sale value of the site, with about 9,000 people writing for the [sic] Huffington Post for free. » | Sam Shead | Wednesday, April 13, 2011
