National Writers Union Drops Huffington Post Boycott After Discovering That No One Cared

from the duh dept

Back in March, we thought it was pretty silly that the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union were calling for a boycott of the Huffington Post, because some of the writers who had agreed to post on the site for free no longer liked the deal. As we said at the time, if you think that writing for free undermines your profession, you have a pretty simple solution: don't do it. But don't agree to write for free and then bitch about how it's unfair. In the end, we suspected that the same reasons why people had written for the Huffington Post in the first place (in order to share their thoughts to a wider audience) would continue to win out.

It appears that is absolutely the case. The National Writers Union has now admitted that it's dropped the boycott, because, well, no one cared. What's amusing is that rather than quietly dropping it, they actually put out a press release saying they were "withdrawing the boycott" which almost no one paid attention to in the first place.

Filed Under: free, journalism
Companies: aol, huffington post, national writers union, newspaper guild