I engaged in a couple different email conversations last week on the subject of newsmagazine-type websites that do not pay. These conversations came hot on the heels of my encounter with the latest issue of Wired magazine which, a bit too giddily, touts FREE! as the "Future of Business." Wowee zowee, hot diggity dog! Well, maybe the FREE! model works for some businesses like Google, but things are trickier for freelance writers and artists, not to mention musicians who are not so well established that they can give away their albums online and rake in the dough from concert tickets.

I don't understand why paying for comics is considered out of the question for major web publications like The Huffington Post. What we make is a laughable pittance when you realize popular sites are pulling in $10,000/week or more from a single advertiser. Huffpo may be dazzling and stylish, but by not paying contributors, it sets a terrible precedent for the future of independent journalism. I guess the prestige of having your byline appear alongside the likes of Bill Maher and Alec Baldwin is supposed to be payment enough.

The obvious problem, of course, is that this model presumes that contributors have other sources of income that allow them to work pro bono. It serves to make the established more established. What about the exposure, you might ask? Well, at some point everything becomes exposure towards getting more exposure, especially as other sites follow suit. WorkingforChange used to pay me (though not without some wrangling at first), and then Huffpo came along and -- it is probably safe to say -- took a chunk of their readership. Several months ago, WorkingforChange did away with its newsmagazine format and dropped most of its cartoonists and columnists.

Suffice it to say, it was more than a little ironic to see sites like Huffpo covering the Hollywood Writers' Strike. Its content may be progressive, but its business model is most certainly not. Note that Huffpo describes its contributors as "bloggers" -- not writers -- evoking an open blogging community like DailyKos. Yet it presents itself as a newspaper, much more along the lines of the NY Times than Kos. The word "blogger" is being used to obscure what used to be called a writer. This is not a business model progressives should be embracing.

For more on the subject, I encourage you to check out this column by my colleague Ted Rall, from a few months ago.