####Layoffs at the Huffington Post

The clip below, from Today in Tabs, sums up a decade and a half of media in a paragraph. The unholy bedfellows (wunderkind, socialite, New York media kingmaker, fascist), the expansion, the stock deals, and finally the layoffs. (Jonah Peretti did those layoffs in a virtual “all hands” meeting.) I was one of those unpaid writers on Huffpost for a long while. It really helped my blog get popular. I recognized that I was sweatshop labor and played along for “the exposure.”

I can recommend the newsletter Today in Tabs to everyone. Rusty captures the complexity of things and also makes you laugh.

Jonah Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005, along with wealthophilic socialite Arianna Huffington, New York media financier and ex-AOL executive Ken Lerer, and fascist media trendsetter Andrew Breitbart. The site was sold to AOL for $315 million in 2011, and acquired back from AOL parent Verizon last year in exchange for “a stock deal” and “an undisclosed cash investment in BuzzFeed.” Peretti originally met Lerer and Huffington as an MIT Media Lab grad student, after he went viral for attempting to order custom Nike shoes with the word “sweatshop” printed on them, ostensibly as a commentary on Nike’s employment practices. The Huffington Post carried work from unpaid writers until 2018.