The high price of media content

The internet age has proved the greatest shift in the habits of the world’s media since the invention of the television. While some traditional outlets have failed to keep pace with the developments that the internet offers, many new outlets have taken advantage of the digital age, thriving on low or no-cost journalistic contributions to make substantial profits.

The Huffington Post has one such success story. Founded by Arianna Huffington and Keneth Lerer in 2005 based on the postings of loyal but unpaid bloggers to the site, the brand has experienced a phenomenal rise in prominence through its suburban journalistic approach to big news stories. Now the website’s reporters receive regular invites to White House press conferences, while Huffington has become a celebrity in her own right.

However, the sale of the site in February to AOL for $315m has created a wave of discontent. While investors and founders became incredibly rich, the bloggers and contributors who were unpaid for their work received little or nothing for their efforts. Now one freelance journalist and former contributor, Jonathan Tasini, has launched a class action legal proceeding against Huffington.

Tasini alleges bloggers were responsible for up to at least a third of the site’s traffic and therefore deserve a third of the sale cost. Tasini has also issued inflammatory statements regarding Huffington’s use of cost-free journalism, stating that: “Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffingtons’s plantation”. Tasini has also threatened to organise strikes among the site’s contributors and demonstrate outside Huffington’s home.

With Tasini having had previous success against The New York Times for using his material online and in print without permission, the case is being watched closely by media companies around the world for the outcome and possible impact upon their own services. Huffington herself has previously been sought to stress the difference between a media group’s employees and media group’s bloggers, who provide content out of loyalty. If it can be established that this content is significant enough to increase the value of the media outlet, it could have significant repercussions for online media outlets.

The cost of employing journalists has been one of the main obstacles for traditional media organisations to profit from the internet. In the UK, while newspapers such as The Guardian have offered their journalism online at a profit loss, other publications such as The Financial Times and many of News International’s newspapers have constructed pay walls around their websites’ content to ensure profitability. The ramifications of this pending case could see payment for content become normal procedure.

The case will also represent another interesting development into the decidedly grey area of law relating to journalism and the internet. With so many other areas of traditional journalistic law seemingly bypassed by the internet – such as defamation and copyright – the Huffington case may represent the start of tougher legal sanctions relating to web postings.

As Huffington becomes the news herself, critics have already lodged their support in her corner, pointing to her insistence of AOL hiring more journalists for The Huffington Post. Despite this, it’s a fair assumption that the thought going through many editors’ minds is simply ‘I hope we’re not next’.