Huffington Post Shuts Down Unpaid Contributor Blogger Program

Huffington Post announced that it will immediately cease its unpaid contributors program -- which led to its rise as a media brand -- to improve the editorial quality of the news site and cut down on unvetted reporting.

HuffPost's blogger network has ballooned to some 100,000 contributors. The decision to end the program by the Verizon-owned site comes under editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen, who joined in December 2016 after more than a decade at the New York Times.

"Open platforms that once seemed radically democratizing now threaten, with the tsunami of false information we all face daily, to undermine democracy," Polgreen wrote in a blog post Thursday. "When everyone has a megaphone, no one can be heard."

AOL acquired HuffPost in 2011 for $315 million, and then Verizon bought AOL in a $4.4 billion deal in 2015. HuffPost is now part of Verizon's Oath division, which has combined AOL and Yahoo businesses under one roof.

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