Bloggers: America's New Class of Slave?

I can say with a fair amount of experience and certainty that blogging is work.  We research, write, and promote.  And yet, many bloggers in America who are blogging for companies are not paid for their labor.  So what do you call it when a company profits from someone's labor without paying that person?  Some people (Gawker.com) will call it slavery.

Earlier this week, Gawker criticized both The Huffington Post and the New York nightlife blog Guest of a Guest for publishing mostly or entirely material by unpaid writers.  Both sites have arguments for why they don't pay: Guest of a Guesteditor Rachelle Hruska claims her "largely unpaid" staff are motivated by parties and a chance to mingle with NYC's social elite; Arianna Huffington similarly argues that exposure is enough for her writers.  And this trend toward extracting free labor is not limited to news or social outlets; AOL has begun asking its bloggers to work for free, in order to save cash in the recession.

Is it ethical for these companies to expect writers to generate content for them for free?  The last I heard, the Washington Post was not hiring copy writers at the salary of "nothing" and CNN anchors weren't being paid in "exposure."  Why should generating online content for a corporation or news outlet be any different?  Taking someone's labor without fairly compensating them (or taking advantage of job desperation) is wrong.  It's wrong if that person is an immigrant picking apples or a woman cleaning hotel rooms or a young wanna-be-journalist writing for The Huffington Post. 

We all know media is changing.  The newspaper industry is crumbling faster than a box of oatmeal cream pies at Cookie Monster's end-of-Ramadan party, in part due to the lower production and distribution costs of online news.  But the ethics of paying writers for their work shouldn't change with the medium.  It's hard enough for traditional news outlets to compete, but when you remove the costs of paying for labor as well?  The future of journalism doesn't stand a chance.      

While I wouldn't go so far as Gawker to compare unpaid bloggers to modern-day slaves or trafficking victims, I think that what HuffPo and others are doing- taking the labor of the young, naïve, and often desperate without compensation- falls on the spectrum of labor exploitation.  It may not be a crime, but it's certainly not good for bloggers, writers, or the future of journalism as a whole.