OPINION
11
Parasitic, Tabloid HuffPo Just Pretends to Do Journalism
The 'supposedly revolutionary über-blog' wears no clothes: Dumenco
By Nick McMaster
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Posted Jun 22, 09 4:15 PM CDT
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(Newser)
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Syracuse University’s SI Newhouse journalism school recently awarded Arianna Huffington one of their lifetime achievement awards, an honor that strikes Simon Dumenco as absurd, he writes for Advertising Age. It sounds like a brutally ironic joke: a school for training journalists honors someone who’s built a popular website on devaluing their work.
HuffPo doesn’t pay its legion of bloggers, and employs five actual reporters—most of whom seem to spend the day copying and pasting large block quotes from other publications, Dumenco observes. Furthermore, while masquerading as a “forward-thinking, respectable voice in the mediasphere,” HuffPo pads its traffic figures with shameless tabloid photo spreads such as “Megan Fox’s Open Thigh Snake Dress (PHOTOS).”