Huffington Post Moving Away from Freelancers

One of the biggest tech-related mergers this year is AOL’s $315 million acquisition of Huffington Post. The website editor and owner, Arianna Huffington, will become the lead editor of the website which is now the Huffington Post Media Group. It’s a very significant acquisition for the online world because it shows how a blog website could become very expensive.

But the movement of Huffington Post from an independent website to AOL is not just a buy-out where the popular website will retain its status-quo as an online journalist. In the process of merger, Huffington Post is slowly eliminating the need for freelancers. The focus of the website is no longer on citizen journalism but on real journalism where they will hire professional editors and writers to write articles on a full time basis. There are still freelance bloggers on the site but they are well known personalities or leaders in their industry.

The reaction from the freelancers with the movement on Huffington Post is naturally negative. It has come to a point where the site is now being sued for more than $100 million. According to the class action lawsuit, Huffington Post reposted some of the content for free in their website without paying the author. Before the revamp of Huffington Post, the website was known to aggregate popular articles online created by other writers without any fee.

Moving away from citizen journalism could be a good business decision for Huffington Post. However, it has created a hole for freelancers and leads the way for another site to take them under its wing.