Why Arianna Should Make HuffPo a Non-Profit

Arianna Huffington is taking some knocks for a recent pronouncement by her partner, Ken Lerer, that the Huffington Post will never pay its bloggers. Ad Age's Simon Dumenco is cheesed off about the unfairness of the whole thing, and he's getting others riled up.

I've occasionally been annoyed by the way Huffington's (sometimes nonsensical) rhetoric fails to match up to her actions. While she rhapsodizes about how the web's not a zero-sum game and bloggers should be "promiscuous" with each other, HuffPo is looking more and more like the web's version of a roach motel: Visitors check in but they don't check out. Why else do you need 6,000 blogs if not to keep web surfers from ever going elsewhere?

All that said, I don't think HuffPo necessarily ought to pay its writers.

Why should it? The top writers are people who hardly need the money: Ephron, Shearer, Bill Maher, and other Hollywood swells. For lesser-known bloggers, a pay-per-view model (which I assume is what Dumenco and other critics have in mind) would create an incentive to write sensational posts. That would totally alter the character of HuffPo, which has always been about public-minded people airing their idiosyncratic grievances.

But Dumenco's right about one thing: Once HuffPo is in the black, it's going to look awfully bad if Arianna Huffington -- who's not exactly living hand-to-mouth -- profits while her "serfs" go empty-handed. That's why I think she should consider a model along the lines of the Poynter Institute, a non-profit that owns the St. Petersburg Times. While the Times pays the Poynter Institute an annual dividend, any profits above that get pumped back into the paper. The result: "an independent, privately owned daily that continues to serve up quality journalism," at a time when other papers are succumbing to pressures to meet absurdly high profit margins, according to The New York Times.

Think about it, Arianna, okay?