Arianna Huffington plugs "Thrive" in Philly

No one is looking forward to Arianna Huffington’s arrival in Philadelphia more than our proud city’s writers, who are buying stacks of her latest book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. She’ll be coming on April 1, and for just $150, you can sit in the audience and then attend a private VIP reception with Huffington herself.

Set your alarms, especially you freelancers who take life at your own pace: it all starts at 8am on a Tuesday.

According to a release from the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia, which is hosting the event, audience members can listen to Huffington’s “realization that there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary.” No one is in a better position to speak on how we should value “our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, [and] sense of wonder” than someone who can command a $150 fee just to appear in the same room as you, and Philly writers have been scrimping and pinching for months in hopes of attending.

Huffington’s new book on choosing inner well-being over salary is sure to explain a lot to HuffPost critics who can’t get over the empire’s policy of not paying its army of bloggers.

In early 2011, with the most condescending article of the decade so far, HuffPost reporter Jason Linkins set out to explain HuffPost’s model to the seething masses.

He says that he’s paid because he is employed as a reporter for HuffPost who must meet deadlines, and being an employee means responsibilities, like “show up and do work. In an office and everything!”

This “entitles one to a ‘salary,’” Linkins goes on, adding that HuffPost editors must constantly field e-mails from “reporters, editors, publishers, publicists and flacks.”

I’m sure the unsalaried, scribbling hoi polloi like me could never imagine that pressure.

All his efforts, he explains, make the “architecture that enables thousands of other people to have a space to come and write and play and inform and start conversations,” i.e., the bloggers that HuffPost can’t spare a dime for.

“Please note, that part of what ‘free’ entitles you to is a freedom from ‘having to work.’ No daily hours, no deadlines, no late nights, no weekends. You just do what you like when the spirit moves you,” he says of why these writers shouldn’t be paid.

So maybe the evolution of the typical writing career from salaried newsrooms to the freelance economy is just my own bizarre personal delusion. I will grant Linkins a little leeway here, since he wrote this back in the Stone Age, but 2011 is the same year I began my full-time freelance writing and editing career, and my life includes meetings, deadlines, and a daily blizzard of pitches. I work evenings and weekends. And I get paid. By several clients. Enough to live on. And something tells me thousands of HuffPost bloggers are freelancers just like me, not people who came home from their lucrative accounting jobs and thought, I’d just love to decompress with a little writing before bed.

Now there certainly is some controversy about the lines between the “reporters” HuffPost pays and the “bloggers” it doesn’t, exemplified by one Mayhill Fowler, who provided unpaid reporting to HuffPost during the 2008 Presidential campaign and broke what she now calls “Bittergate,” the remarks from Obama about the things conservative small-town Americans “cling to,” a sound bite that echoes ‘round the world to this day. HuffPost nominated this “citizen journalist” for two Pulitzers.

But Fowler told HuffPost she didn’t want to continue providing such scoops gratis, even though, as she writes on her blog, “I am one of only a handful of national pundits who totally get Barack Obama.”

(I’m sure there’s a reliable metric for that.)

And so the battle continues, with HuffPost staffers and executives claiming that its bloggers aren’t entitled to be paid any more than people with personal Twitter or Facebook accounts, and bloggers arguing that the editorial oversight and fact-checking they were subject to on the HuffPost roster was hardly like an average day in social-media land.

Nate Silver, on his “FiveThirtyEight” New York Times blog, does the math as well as he can and concludes that if we’re going by ad revenue from views per page, the traffic HuffPost bloggers generate would entitle them to a few cents per article. So if HuffPost is hoodwinking anybody, it’s not because they’re making oodles of money off of advertising next to unpaid bloggers’ posts, but because they’re reeling free content from bloggers in with a false promise of huge exposure, which, on the HuffPost site, rarely happens for “blog posts.”

So when Arianna Huffington herself is coming to town, what’s a freelancer like me to do?

I will try to focus on what the press release promises from a morning with Huffington: a better understanding of “our capacity for compassion and giving.” Because who needs that kind of heart more than the writers who have helped her build a mega-media empire for free?

(Full disclosure: while I don’t write for HuffPost, for free or otherwise, I occasionally take a half-hour to appear as an unpaid pundit head on HuffPost Live when producers pitch a segment that interests me.)

Arianna Huffington is speaking about her new book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, on Tuesday April 1, 8-10am at the Hyatt at the Bellevue’s Grand Ballroom, 200 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia. General admission tickets are $50; VIP tickets are $150. For more information, visit the Arts & Business Council’s website.