goin' poachin'

This is the way the HuffPo rolls, writes Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader: Give us your work, we'll give you exposure. But not, unfortunately, money.

Or publish something somewhere, and we'll link to it, along with a clever riff. But we won't pay for that, either.

But it's not just the HuffPo, it's most blogs. (Ahem) And most of them have only the tiniest fraction of HuffPo's readers.

Makes you wonder: Why are so many writers willing to work for free? Why can bloggers (ahem again) get away with poaching -- even though they call it aggregation? And, as someone smart once mused, don't people who know what they are doing do it better when they are paid to do it?

Or have we decided that all you need to call yourself a journalist -- is a day job.

If the HuffPo is the future of journalism, fine. It's smart and entertaining. But if the HuffPo model is the future, maybe not so much. bk