Bloggers React To AOL And Huffington Post Lawsuit

The Huffington Post unethically made over $100 million in profit from its unpaid bloggers when the news web site merged with AOL in February, according to a lawsuit filed last week.

The Huffington Post, which launched in 2005, collects news articles, blog posts and opinion pieces from approximately 9,000 unpaid writers. Co-founder Arianna Huffington sold the web site to AOL for $315 million in a highly publicized merger; the class-action suit, filed by freelance journalist Jonathan Tasini, alleges that the posts created by unpaid writers were worth an estimated $105 million, and that the profit should have been used as compensation.

"The Huffington Post was, is and will never be, anything without the thousands of people who created the content," Tasini wrote in a blog post after filing the suit. "Ms. Huffington is acting like every Robber Baron CEO - from Lloyd Blankfein to the Waltons - who believes that they, and only they, should pocket huge riches, while the rest of the peons struggle to survive." Tasini wrote more than 250 posts for the web site.

More