By Paul Harris, The Observer, 27 February 2011

.....America's Newspaper Guild, the journalists' union, has started a campaign to target the Huffington Post as having a business model that has done great damage by not paying contributors..."To grasp its business model... you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates," blasted Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten.

Blogger and cartoonist Matt Bors revealed that he refused a HuffPo offer to put his work on the website because it would not pay him. He called the HuffPo business model of offering publicity and exposure instead of money "abhorrent". David Carr, the New York Times media critic, mentioned the HuffPo's business practices in an article headlined "At media companies, a nation of serfs".  Even HuffPo bloggers joined the condemnation....

....Huffington said she had always envisioned the HuffPo as more than just a politics website and said it had no overall ideology. To many observers that seemed like a deliberate rewriting of the past, and certainly a strong suggestion that AOL's corporate ownership would see it tone down the site's liberal campaigning....