Memewatch: Arianna Now Media-Biz Bogeyman

Not too long ago it was fashionable to blame Craigslist for the collapse of newspaper revenues. Well, Craig Newmark, a.k.a. "Exploder of Journalism," you can come out of hiding, because it seems that Arianna Huffington has inherited your black hat and mustache.

In a Time magazine profile, Belinda Luscombe pronounces the Huffington Post a harmful parasite, sucking the lifeblood of the newspapers, wire services and fellow websites whose content it relies on to draw traffic:

The success of her site has allowed Huffington, 58, to reinvent herself again, from Bush-bashing pundit to media mogul and digital pioneer. But as the enterprise grows, even a pedigreed networker like Huffington may find that it's hard to keep friends in the media when she's killing their business.

More:

[N]ews organizations may not tolerate others cherry-picking their content and repurposing it for profit for much longer. "Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post," says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "It's not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it's about the value." There are other aggregators, but HuffPo is the most tempting. "It's a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line" between fair and unfair use of copy, Benton notes.

Huffpo, Craigslist, Craigslist, Huffpo -- can't we all just agree to blame Google?