HuffPo's missing link

Keith J. Kelly

MEDIA INK

Why not suspend them all?

That's the question raised by the Huffington Post's decision this week to "indefinitely suspend" a young writer, Amy Lee, for cribbing liberally from an AdAge column.

The move has sparked widespread criticism that founder Arianna Huffington is seeking a scapegoat for a controversial practice that her site has long condoned -- repackaging others' work as its own.

Critics contend that only outside pressure and bad publicity forced Huffington to react, and that there are few internal checks and balances to govern how and when to pick up others' material.

Dan Doctoroff, president and CEO of Bloomberg, is taking on some duties that once fell to Chairman Peter Grauer.

Arianna Huffington is seeking a scapegoat for a controversial practice that her site has long condoned -- repackaging others' work as its own.

"I think [Lee] has been thrown under the bus," one ex-HuffPo employee told Media Ink. "There were people who took much, but they never reacted -- unless someone from outside said something."

The blowup was triggered this week when HuffPo Business Editor Peter Goodman summarily suspended Lee after AdAge columnist Simon Dumenco complained that she buried the link to his original story that formed the basis for her post.

Dumenco titled his piece, "What It's Like to Get Used and Abused by The Huffington Post." While HuffPo said it encourages links, Dumenco found otherwise and branded its style of pickup as "unethical."

Dumenco singled out a recent AdAge.com post that was picked up by HuffPo and cited Google Analytics stats suggesting that HuffPo's practices actually discourage its readers from linking to original work.

Goodman quickly reacted by suspending Lee -- a move that Dumenco was not exactly thrilled to hear.

"I imagine that, like me, you've been reading the reactions that have been rippling across the media blogosphere, and you're finding that there's general unanimity that HuffPo is singling out -- indeed, scapegoating -- a young writer for engaging in a style of aggregation long practiced, condoned and encouraged by Huffington Post editorial management," Dumenco wrote yesterday on AdAge.com.

Arianna Huffington -- who went from running a 50-person newsroom before AOL's $315 million acquisition of the site this year, to overseeing 1,500 as the president and editor-in-chief of all of AOL's media properties -- is said to be very sensitive to bad publicity.

"She would say at meetings that we have zero tolerance for mistakes, that our aim is perfection," said a former staffer, who pointed out the absurdity in trying accomplish that with a 40- or 50-person staff putting out hundreds of stories a day. "Inevitably, someone would misspell a name or run the wrong photo with a story."