MONTREAL – A week before launch, Huffington Post Quebec has lost at least nine high-profile contributors – intellectuals, leftist activists and politicians – who’d agreed to blog but have now pulled out over concerns they’d be writing for free.
Amir Khadir, Steven Guilbault, Normand Baillargeon, Francoise David, Evelyne de la Cheneliere, Jean Barbe, Philippe Couillard, Bernard Drainville and Pierre Curzi say they won’t blog for the new online news site.
Two others – Vision Montreal leader Louise Harel and feminist Djemila Benhabib, author of Ma vie a contre-Coran – are sitting on the fence and also may be absent when the French-language, American-owned site goes online here on Feb. 8.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Patrick White, HuffPost Quebec’s managing editor said of the defections. “I think it’s very sad that their voices will not be heard.
“But you know, we’re talking about maybe 10 or 12 bloggers who have left out of 135 – we still have 120 bloggers,” White added.
“Some are well-known: people teaching at university, philosophers, politicians, people specializing in their fields of sports and entertainment.
“But it’s not a question of having well-known people or not. We’ll just have quality blogs.”
Controversy erupted before Christmas when news leaked out that well-known leftists, such as Quebec Solidaire’s Khadir and David, as well as environmentalist and Equiterre co-founder Guilbault and libertarian intellectual author Baillargeon, would be donating their services to HuffPost as unpaid bloggers.
So would well-known artists such as de la Cheneliere, whose 2002 play Bashir Lazhar was made into the Oscar-nominated 2011 movie Monsieur Lazhar.
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In some cases, however, it emerged that the blogs would not be original content but instead would be reproduced off the writers’ own blogs (in the case of David), or recycled from open letters already circulating on the Web (in the case of Khadir).
Even so, commentators, such as Simon Jodoin in the cultural weekly Voir, denounced their participation as selling out to big-business and undermining local journalism by giving their stuff away for free.
In the U.S., the New York-based Huffington Post is being sued by blogger and labour activist Jonathan Tasini for $105 million on behalf of the site’s more than 9,000 unpaid bloggers.
He argues they should be compensated for adding enormous value to the company, which launched with a small staff of five in 2005 and grew into an online media powerhouse that, a year ago, was bought by media giant AOL for $315 million.
The controversy over unpaid bloggers here is actually good for the new service, White said.
Results of a poll in November of 1,000 Quebecers revealed that 82 per cent had never heard of the Huffington Post. “The brand was not well-known in Quebec,” but likely is now because of the negative publicity, White said.
“Frankly, the controversy we received helped us, in a way,” said White, 41, who formerly worked for Canoe.ca, Le Journal de Quebec, La Presse Canadienne, Reuters and CTV News.
“A lot of other bloggers came to see us because of that, journalists came to work for us because of that, and at the end of day, it was a positive for us because the Huffington brand is much better-known now and less obscure.”
Among those still signed up to blog are: actresses Charlotte Laurier and Micheline Lanctot; Michel Kelly-Gagnon, CEO of the Montreal Economic Institute; Louis Bernard, former chief of staff to ex-Quebec premier Rene Levesque; sociologist Jean-Philippe Warren, who holds the Concordia University research chair on the study of Quebec; Parti Quebecois backbencher Yves-Francois Blanchet; and Bruno Guglielminetti, an ex-Radio Canada technology journalist who now works for National Public Relations.
The complete list of bloggers will be revealed when the service launches next Wednesday in Montreal. It will include MPs from the federal and Quebec Liberal parties, the federal NDP and the federal Conservatives, White said.
With a paid staff of seven and a network of 200 paid freelancers, Huffington Post Quebec is the latest foreign venture of the U.S.-based news service founded in May 2005 by Greek-American author and political commentator Arianna Huffington. After AOL bought the company in Feb. 2011, Huffington stayed on as its top editor.
Huffington Post Canada, the service’s first foreign edition, launched online last May, followed by a British edition in July. Le Huffington Post launched in France last week, a Spanish edition will begin the third week of March and an Italian one in April.
There are also negotiations to start three other foreign editions this year, in Germany, Brazil and Turkey.
Huffington, 61, will be in Montreal on Wednesday morning for the launch of the Quebec service.
With a staff of 20 employees and with bloggers as diverse as David Suzuki and Conrad Black, the Canadian edition gets more than 1.8 million unique visitors a month, including 200,000 from Quebec, according to comScore.
With a staff of 200 employees and more than 9,000 bloggers, the U.S. site receives 35 million visitors each month.
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