I’m always hearing the Left complain that evil employers completely disregard the families, the children, their poor employees when they get laid-off from work purely for improving profits. I wonder how much traction those complaints would have against Arianna Huffington;
As usual, Armstrong and Huffington are waxing on about investing in high-quality, original content produced by actual journalists. But AOL staffers have heard that one before, so the renewed pledge comes across as a little hollow, especially given that dozens of veteran journalists are being let go.
It’s very difficult for Huffington to argue credibly that she plans to invest in original journalism at the very same time that she and Armstrong are giving dozens of veteran reporters the old heave-ho. Despite a few high-profile hires and her stable of well-publicized celebrity bloggers, HuffPo has always been focused on aggregation and voluminous content from unpaid writers.
As New York Times executive editor Bill Keller pungently observed: “Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.”
And, oh, 700 of those jobs that were eliminated were in India. So Huffington was outsourcing overseas? Isn’t that one of the touchstone no-nos of the Left?
No, a majority of those jobs in India were AOL based support and development positions. AOL is on the way out and everyone knows it. The good years are long gone and trickle-down Google hires are being brought in by the old boy system so they can suck off the teet until it runs dry.
My wife was in the so-called “last large scale layoff” in Jan 09, cut while 8 months pregnant and replaced by a googler with half the experience and twice the salary.
But then what do you expect from a company that once kept its name off the campus buildings in Ashburn so that the customers couldn’t easily locate it.
Oh me oh my. The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
The good writers, whether formerly paid or unpaid, will find other homes.
The horror is the thousands of Progressive syncophants who have nowhere to go but troll.
And yes, Huffington sleeps very well at night.
I did a drive by on the commie blogs…surprisingly enough, I found several dozen posts about the nuke plants in Japan and a handful of pillow biters/bedwetters upset about Teleprompter Jebus’ condoning the “torture” of Miss Manning, but nothing about Huffington. Mah’velous, dahling.
She was forced to take such measures to be competitive with the evil corporate America. 🙂
Yes, you cannot be liberal and not be max hypocritical.