The Journo Blues: A Song Inspired By Arianna Huffington

By Jake Adelstein

The big lie that journalists and most young Americans are told today is that working for free will eventually net them a job. The unpaid intern has become a wonderful source of exploitable labor.  With people so desperate to get their foot in the door, many people are willing to work their ass off in the hope that someday they will actually get paid for their labor.  Recently, a federal  judge has dismissed that class action lawsuit filed last Spring by a group of unpaid bloggers suing the Huffington Post for pay, falling on the side of the Huffington Post. Of course, the class action suit was unlikely to succeed because the bloggers had all agreed to forfeit pay for “exposure.”

This business model of using unpaid journos and ripping off stories from the mainstream press will probably work for a few more years, until there are no paid journalists left to do the actual reporting. It’s partially a myth that bloggers are parasites on the mainstream media, and blogs do handle stories the mainstream media shuns,  but if you look closely at the Huffington Post, a large amount of their material is still repackaging original reporting from the old established press. Citizen journalism is laudatory but investigative journalism is time consuming and expensive, and if no one pays for it–it will wither and die.

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