I honestly don’t know if I know how to write this post. I’ve already started it three times in my head and once on the blog, a whole sentence typed and ready to go about how sick I am. But most people already know that.
A few minutes ago I decided to check my email. One of my friends was so kind (?) as to send me a link to an “article” in the Huffington Post written by some attention-seeking jackass named Alan Kaufman. Because Kaufman is an attention-seeking jackass I’m tempted to not link his post. I may. It depends on how much of my mad I get banged out on this before I go back and find the link and all that jazz.
Anyway, Attention-Seeking Jackass Alan Kaufman wrote this bit of garbage in the Huffington Post ( I’ve credited it twice for all you able-bodied Googlers out there) wherein he claims that e-books are the triumph of Nazi philosophy and aims, the zenith of Nazi book-burning ideals. The gist of the post is that The Final Solution was a model of German efficiency, as were many other aspects of the Third Reich. As a woman who first read Eugen Kogen’s The Theory And Practice of Hell at age 12, I can attest to this fact. I can also attest to the fact that there are cars and coffee makers in half the households in this world that are the step-grandchildren of Nazi engineering. I myself will never own a Mercedes or a Krupp.
Kaufman then further dribbles with his insanely Luddite-on-Acid ravings that all technology is the stepchild of Nazi-ism in that it is kin to the Nazis goal of ridding the World Engine of the entropy of waste. The Kindle, with its ability to delete books, is the ultimate triumph of the book burners. Because the books just vanish into thin air.
He then argues against himself because while the books disappear (bad) they also leave a trail (also bad, but completely illogical and artless) that tracks which books you’ve read, robbing you of all privacy. Someone, somewhere out there will own the information about the information you own.
I don’t really want to take the time to argue with this crazy person. But I do need to say a few things in defence of my Kindle. I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of writers in recent days. I know that there are certain pockets of disdain for the Kindle and its ilk among the literary, because they fear it as the Death of the Book. None of them have put it in so grandiosely ridiculous a way as Kaufman, but they all think similar thoughts. You can hear it when they say things like “there’s something about the pages, the feel of an actual book”. And I agree with them.
But here is where I step in. I used to say those things myself. I still do say them, as a matter of fact, but in a different way. Because while there is a romance about a book, whether illuminated and calligraphed by cloistered monks or run off en masse by soulless presses (something else I’m sure was once decried as an evil technology), the true essence of a book is one thing only. A book is the vapor of ideas, bottled and transmuted from one person to another. The size and shape of the bottle may vary. It may be as ornate as the Book of Kells or as pedestrian as a supermarket paperback. But the book itself is a phenomenon without equal in humanity. It is our most tangible magic. If you truly stop to think about what a book IS, you may lose your mind in the contemplation. The only thing that e-Books do is make those bottled vapors more accessible. Easier to transport. Easier to consume. I fail to see how this is a bad thing for the Book in general. Since owning my Kindle I’ve bought four times the number of books I did in the previous six months. I’ve become more energised with modern published works, more in touch with a wider variety of literature. The Kindle, with its ease of use and access, makes it far easier for me to find and buy a new work than any other invention in the world.
Kaufman raves on about how this new technology will ghettoise The Book and eventually exterminate it. I sit in wonder at his lack of reason. I don’t understand how giving more books to more people is going to end the existence of books. His go-to line, that he loves so much he uses it twice, is “when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.” Funny, because when I hear the term Alan Kaufman I think not of a writer but of a lunatic Luddite, an Attention-seeking jackass.
I know this post is dreadfully long, and I’m sorry for adding this coda in a way, but I feel it must be said. What happened in Europe all those years ago was one of the most horrible examples of the worst humanity has to offer. I feel that there is not one thing worse when speaking of the Holocaust than to cheapen it. When you liken other things–chickens for KFC, books on the Kindle–to the mass extermination of human beings you make yourself look like a callous and craven individual so desperate for attention, so eager to make a point, that you will disregard real tragedy in search of your own glorification. The fact that Kaufman would even contemplate making this analogy sickens me to my core. Especially since he’s doing so over something so ridiculous as a two hundred and fifty dollar piece of plastic.
I also wanted to add a further coda. I changed the title of this post because while the initial title was meant to be angrily ironic I still couldn’t keep it no matter what. It was too horrific to contemplate. I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around how ridiculously angry this man’s little screed has made me.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
Eh, the man is a fool. A fool desperately seeking for stretched analogies. He’ll be sorry when he sobers up.
But The Book … have you read Primo Levi’s book about Auschwitz? The American title, sadly, is Survival in Auschwitz, but the original Italian title is Se questo e un uomo, If This Be a Man, which is what the book is about. And one chapter, IIRC called “The Canto of Ulysses,” is about Levi’s attempt one day at “work” to teach a canto of the Divine Comedy to another prisoner, one who knew no Italian, let alone medieval Italian. Because it was important to him that literature be passed along, even in Auschwitz. The Book is not tied to forms; we still read works that were first inscribed on clay tablets and baked. That’s not going to go away.
See, this is why in libraryland we talk about the distinction between “content” and “container.” I do love the smell of an old book, and storing books on shelves, and flipping through the pages, but these are container issues, not content issues – and I’m totally willing to be wooed by new containers as long as I can continue to access the content I want.
And Kat, I believe you’ve mentioned before that the Kindle is essentially an adaptive technology for you which allows you to experience that content in a way which had become painful for you otherwise. This is something that “omg technology = death of the book!” arguments completely fail to consider.
. Perhaps you intuit that I am, if not entirely correct, possibly on to something, and psychologically-speaking you find that unacceptable? I wonder, as I find your fury so interesting. Such a level of anger, generally-speaking, conceals enormous fear.
Enclosed essay preceded the one in Huffington Post.
http://evergreenreview.com/120/electronic-book-burning.html
And these are some remarks I made at a recent panel on the topic at Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco:
I hope that these will help you to arrive, if not at a revised opinion, at least at one that will preseve you from a stroke.
Or perhaps she’s just morally squicked out by the trivialization of the Holocaust.
You know, nm, contrary to the pedagogic standards of today’s educational system, attendance of a showing of
Tarrantino’s ‘Inglorious Bastards’ does not equipt you
to contribute to a discussion of ‘The Holocaust’. My guess is that as with the author of this blog, you, and a great many of the indfignant respondants to my essay, haven’t even a clue as to what I’m talking about vis a vis the Holocaust. If you want to really engage me in dialogiue, reading Isaiah Trunk’s ‘Judenrat’, Raul Hilberg’s ‘The Destruction of European Jewry”, Lucy Dadowitz’s ‘The War Against The Jews’, IBM and the Holocaust, just to name a few starter volumes, and then get back to me. Try reading the whole book as book, not skipping here and there through Kindle while you check your emails, post on Facebook, read up on Lindsy Lohan, and search ebay for ski boots. Hedigger and Google have captured your brains. and are shelving them somewhere in labeled jars (virtually, of course. The real ones have been destroyed.)
Honey, I have a Ph.D. in history. And I’ve read a lot of scholarly books on the Holocaust. Cover to cover, including footnotes. Thanks for playing, but in my educated opinion, your article trivializes the deaths of millions, including many of my relatives. And your immediate retreat to ill-founded ad hominem arguments doesn’t strengthen your case. Just as your misspelling of “Inglourious” (sic in the movie title) and “equip” in a sentence decrying current educational standards makes you appear a tad ridiculous.
Wow Kat, you forgot to include “arrogant” with the “attention-seeking jackass” description. Perhaps you intended for the arrogant part to be included under “jackass” but really, arrogance this profound deserves it’s own, specific, notation.
If you want to really engage me in dialogiue
I can assure you that after reading this comment, there is nothing I, for one, would rather do less than engage you in “dialogiue [sic]”.
See below for a partial bibliography of my Holocaust studies over the last 30 years. And enjoy your stay under my bridge.
Oh, and HOW DARE YOU even suggest that we are adherents to Heidegger! You are, in the most basic and earnest sense of the word at its purest, a schmuck.
E-readers are the death of the book the same way computers were the death of typed text. oh wait…
Books have been around as long as there has been written language. What perhaps Mr. Kaufman fails to understand is that the current bound pages he thinks of as a book replaced accordion folded books, which replaced scroll books, which replaced clay tablet books, which replaced stone tablet books (yes I’m over simplifying the evolution of the modern book, but it’s close enough to make my point). Changing technology to allow something to be easier, more efficient, more accessible, etc doesn’t signal the death of the content or task that new technology facilitates. Piano’s didn’t kill music, cars didn’t kill travel, ovens didn’t kill baking, need I continue?
Let’s not play internet psychologist, Mr. Kaufman. Words mean things; take responsibility for the ideas that you expressed. Rather than compounding the asshattery by suggesting that writers who disagree with you suffer from a reaction formation (Freud you are not), you might want to engage with the argument Kat advances.
Frankly, I don’t think you have the intellectual horses to do that.
Mr. Kaufman,
My anger doesn’t conceal fear–but perhaps your irrational fear masks something within you. I don’t know.
I do know that you are trying, and failing, to make a point about an electronic device from which you feel enormously threatened.
So threatened as to presume to cheapen the deaths of millions of people by likening that dark and wicked time to…a computer gadget.
LIVES were brutally stolen from people through a sickeningly systematic machine of murder. LIVES. Human lives. Actual people.
And you liken that system of murder to a new way to read books? Absurd.
As another person has already mentioned, the Kindle is an enabling technology for me. As a relatively young woman crippled by Rheumatoid Arthritis the Kindle makes it possible for me to read books I can no longer hold in my hand. To me, and thousands like me, the Kindle is nothing short of a miracle. It’s like being handed the key to your favourite house–a house you’d been locked out of by cruel circumstance.
I am a book lover, as any who know me can attest. I am also an author. I have no fear of the Book’s demise. But I just cannot believe that you attempted to make whatever half-thought-out points you wanted to make at the expense of those millions of people’s suffering and death.
My guess is that as with the author of this blog, you, and a great many of the indfignant respondants to my essay, haven’t even a clue as to what I’m talking about vis a vis the Holocaust.
You make a grave error when you assume that because this is “just a blog” that I and the others who comment here are complete and utter fools. I am honoured beyond measure by the fact that this blog and others that I read allow me to have scholarly conversations with many people who are current or former professors of History and Literature. While I admit I’m an autodidact with several years of college but no degree, I can largely somehow manage to maintain a dialog with these people.
I am going to make an exception here to my standing rule of not giving out a CV in every discussion I enter into on the Internet. I am going to list for you every book* [Except that I gave up after an hour, so it’s not nearly every book…*] I’ve read on the Holocaust. (Pardon me if I leave out the number of courses I’ve taken on the matter and the number of Rabbis with whom I’ve undertaken private study on this and other issues of Judaica.)
We’ll start with the ones you’ve listed that I’ve read:
Judenrat
The Destruction of European Jewry–(This is actually by Nora Levin. I’ve read it. The books by Hilberg are “The Destruction of the European Jews”, which I have also read.)
Now we’ll move on to others that I’ve read which you didn’t list. Pardon me if I miss a few, as I’ve been studying Judaica seriously for 28 years, with a side focus on the Holocaust, as it overlaps with my extensive studies in both political science and the history of World War II. I’m working from memory and a couple Holocaust Bibliography websites, but I’m sure given the fact that my memory is somewhat altered by my present illness that I will indeed miss a few. And of course you’ll pardon me for throwing the odd piece of fiction in there as well. As much as I loathe modern fiction regarding the Holocaust (anything after the Holocaust Season ignited by Schindler’s List, that Begnini movie and others), I do find a lot of interest in fiction pertaining to the Holocaust, especially the works of Wouk.
The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian-Hillberg
Hitler’s War Against the Jews–the Holocaust: A Young Reader’s Version of the War Against the Jews 1933-1945. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1978
Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust. New York: Holiday House, 1988.
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Pocket Books, 1953.
Friedman, Ina R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
Grossman, Mendel. With a Camera in the Ghetto. New York: Schocken, 1977.
Volavkova, Hana, ed. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings & Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944.
Bauer, Yehuda and Nili Keren. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, 1982.
Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1993
Baynes, Norman H. , ed. Speeches of Adolf Hitler. London: Oxford UP, 1942.
Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984.
De Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Engelmann, Bernt. In Hitler’s Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Jews in Europe during the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986.
Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. (This is a sort of pull-out from Hilberg’s larger work, but still of interest.)
Morse, Arthur. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Empathy. New York: Random House, 1967.
Rothchild, Sylvia. Voices From the Holocaust. New York: New American Library, 1981.
Welch, David. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. London: Routledge, 1993.
Appleman-Jurman, Alicia. Alicia: My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.
Bierman, John. The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust. New York: Viking Press, 1981.
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Friedman, Philip. Their Brothers’ Keepers. New York: Crown, 1957.
Gies, Miep and Allison L. Gold. Anne Frank Remembered. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Kahane, David. Lvov Ghetto Diary. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. (I admit I did not read this prior to the movie. I still consider it to not be one of the better works, but admit it is one of the more accessible to those just beginning study into the Holocaust.)
Miller, Arthur. Playing for Time. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Steiner, Jean-Francois. Treblinka. New York: Bard/Avon, 1975.
Wiesel, Elie. The Gates of the Forest. New York: Schocken, 1982.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982. (I read this the year it came out–more than a decade before Oprah featured it, thank you very much.)
Bauer, Yehuda. They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity.
I’m continuing the list here, as I believe there is a limit on the number of characters in a comment on WordPress…
——
Maxwell, Elisabeth. Why Should the Holocaust Be Remembered and Therefore Taught?
Zornberg, Ira. Classroom Strategies for Teaching about the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1983.
Bauer, Yehuda. American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1939-1945. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.
Dinnerstein, Leonard. America and the Survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Dobkowski, Michael, N. ed. The Politics of Indifference: A Documentary History of Holocaust Victims in America. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982.
Feingold, Henry. The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust 1938-1945. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970.
Lacquer, Walter. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s Final Solution. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.
Lipstadt, Deborah. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. New York: Free Press, 1986.
Morse, Arthur. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. New York: Random House, 1967.
Penkower, Monty Noam. The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Ross, Robert. So It Was True: The American Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.
Grosshans, Henry. Hitler and the Artists. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983.
Hinz, Berthold. Art in the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Gutman, Israel. Denying the Holocaust. [Jerusalem]: Shazar Library, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1985.
Knoller, Rivkah, ed. Denial of the Holocaust: A Bibliography of Literature Denying or Distorting the Holocaust, and of Literature about this Phenomenon. Ramat Gan, Israel: Faculty of Jewish Studies, Bar-Ilan University, 1992.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, c1993.
Littell, Franklin H., Irene G. Shur, Claude R. Foster, eds. In Answer. West Chester, Pa.: Sylvan, 1988.
Pressac, Jean-Claude. Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989.
Roth, Stephen J. Denial of the Holocaust: An Issue of Law. London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1994.
Seidel, Gill. The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism & the New Right. Leeds, England: Beyond the Pale Collective; London: Distributed by Turnaround Distribution, 1986.
Katz, Jacob. The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986.
Yes, We Sang!: Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps / Shoshana Kalisch with Barbara Meister. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row, c1985.
Aronsfeld, Caesar C. The Text of the Holocaust: A Study of Nazi Eextermination Propaganda, 1919-1945. Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, [1985].
Boelcke, Willi A., ed. The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels: The Nazi Propaganda War, 1939. Ewald Osers, trans. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970.
Bramsted, Ernest Kohn. Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda, 1925-1945. [East Lansing, Mich.]: Michigan State University Press, 1965.
Adler, Stanislaw. In the Warsaw Ghetto: 1940-1943: An Account of an Eyewitness. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1982.
Ainsztein, Reuben. The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. New York: Holocaust Library, 1979.
I’ve pretty much read everything Primo Levi wrote when he was alive–there are some posthumous volumes I’ve not gotten my hands on yet.
My grandmother knew and/or met Corrie Ten Boom. (I was a child and not clear on the whole story.) We had two of Ten Boom’s books–The Hiding Place and Tramp For The Lord–both of which I’ve read countless times.
I’m frankly worn out listing all of these. There are several more. Of course there’s the Kogen book I mentioned earlier, several more about various escapes and escape attempts from camps (i.e. Escape from Sobibor, etc.), general fiction like the abominable Sophie’s Choice, the peerless War And Remembrance, the disturbing Maus…
I don’t know that I have the time or inclination to dig through 30 years of memory anymore.
Hopefully this basic list will satisfy you as far as assuring you that my knowledge of the politics, circumstances and operations of the Third Reich, The Final Solution (Oh yeah, I’ve read the actual Wannsee protocol) extends far beyond the most recent Tarantino film.
Kat, I’m fairly sure that there’s no point, so far as Mr. Kaufman is concerned, in your listing your reading. It will never be enough for him to admit your right to have an opinion of his work, just as there will never be enough evidence of the Holocaust itself to convince deniers. Some people are so in love with their own theories that no one who disagrees with them can be allowed, in their eyes, to have the standing to debate them. Evidently Mr. Kaufman is one of these, and that makes both presenting your credentials or attempting to debate him futile.
nm–you make a very good point. As a fanatical believer in his own opinions, it is useless to argue with Mr. Kaufman. Interesting how zealotry lurks in the “ANTI” anything: anti-technology, anti-this, anti-that. This is projective identification at its height, and in my opinion Mr. Kaufman, though in possession of a vocabulary (which he uses to clutter and destroy his prose, in my opinion) is mentally ill –and much TOO mentally ill to realize that he’s ill at all. He tunes out anything he doesn’t want to hear (evidenced by his constant re-posting of his articles but refusal to actually respond to valid, intelligent objections to his argument).
It’s been a pleasure reading this. I do however think that continuing the debate much further is only going to give him google hits, and convince him of his own self-importance. He’s a fanatic and and he’s mentally unstable. I say leave it at that.
I get the feeling that Katherine Cobel is morbbidly obese, eats too much sugar and is in a depressed rage. Her profile pic looks all putty-white and puffy. And everything she says is psycho-level pissed off.
I hearda Kaufman. He’s done stuff. I never heard of any of you. He’s got guts. You’re like the zombie mob in a Cannongate remake of a bad Franekenstein flick, standing outside Kaufman’s castle with your torches, howling for his blood.
Why don’t you all fug off, stop pickin on this man a courage.
Bunch a computor geek gutless fatheads here.
Checking this site out, juz realized. This is like the angry overweight ladies blog club. Put down that
Krispy Creme, Momma. Wipe da crumbs from yor lips. Pick yo your arm, if you can lift it. Take a sniff. That’s right: you smell bad.
“In fact, history is replete with characters ignored or reviled and later revived and adored when the times of our world caught up with their idea or vision. There are many examples of great people who didn’t get their due during their time because few could identify with their point of view. Either they were too eccentric, too out of the norm or too radical – just too different from the mainstream or the popular view of their time. So, they were ignored, ridiculed, shunned and in some cases even arrested and imprisoned. These are people across all walks of life – thinkers, leaders, philosophers, inventors, poets, painters, economists, authors, actors and even comedians – but contemporary history is always a product of its own times and any review of history cannot be done without keeping its chronology in context. There are very few absolute truths outside the disciplines of science and history is no exception. All it means is that, even in this day and age when there are more scientific methods than ever before to verify the truth behind an inquiry, one who is seeking historical knowledge has to understand this and make their own judgments with the information they have. Like Hallett Carr and John Lukacs suggest in their own way:
Before you study the history, study the historian, and before you study the historian, study his history.”
From:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:BADvFHlDo5wJ:lazydabbler.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/historical-figures-%E2%80%93-a-perspective-on-reading-and-writing-about-them/+great+thinkers+who+were+ridiculed+in+their+time&cd=13&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
guidelines
http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=93084
Ha ha ha ha! Kaufman: thank you for proving my point so beautifully!
You have nothing intelligent to say, so you resort to insults and disguises (not a good idea to claim “courage” under an online disguise; it *really* makes you look foolish). Oh, the hours you must be spending online, hunting and pecking your way through all the posts, trying to get one-up on all those internet bloggers! Good thing there’s an internet for you to use so you can feel you “win,” huh?
See, here’s the thing with people like you: you will always get in your own way. The rest of us don’t have to go after your blood –you will do that all by yourself, no matter how hard you try not to. (Oh, and I’m done with your blood –don’t worry. It’s poisonous).
I won’t be coming back here to read your next pathetic shout, so–
Rage on, tiny man. Thanks for a great laugh!
Do you figure Doctor Poetry is a sockpuppet and not just some random troll?
All I can say for sure is that Dr. Poetry has the same WHOIS as Alan Kaufman. Of course, to me that screams Sockpuppet. But since I wasn’t standing over him at whatever San Francisco internet cafe he pounded these little screeds out in, I can’t say for 100% sure.
That would certainly explain how the one had heard of the other.
That’s funny. When Kaufman couldn’t scare you with big words, he just switched names and resorted to more childish insults.
On a slightly off topic point, I’d just like to say, that at least we don’t write for free on Huffington’s website so that she can get richer and more famous.
Even if we were all idiots, at least we’re not that stupid.
I had no idea that HuffPo didn’t pay its contributors.
Why would you work for someone with obvious money who isn’t paying you some of that money for your work?
Only if I were promoting a book would I do such a thing. And then only maybe.
Well, I don’t know if that’s still her deal, but it was her deal–no one gets paid. So all of that stuff about it being some new form of media and being profitable, etc. etc. is all based on unpaid labor.
Speak of the devil—
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-et-onthemedia18-2009dec18,0,1697228,full.column
Nope, no one’s getting paid. This dude’s doing the same thing we’re doing, writing for free, but he’s letting someone else make money off of it, and he seems to think that the fact he’s that big a fool gives him some moral authority the rest of us lack.
Ha.
Not correct. I’ve freelanced and been paid by them, and my friend Molly Secour who is also a journalist, documentary filmmaker and political activist was just hired (for good money) from Huff Po to be their Nashville correspondent.
Their bloggers aren’t paid–like Alec Baldwin, who feel a need to tell the world what they think, which a lot of people do. Alec’s opinion is no more important than yours or mine, so I don’t see why he or those who want their opinions heard should be paid.
But HuffPo pays people who report accurate information. The only thing I am aware of her paying for– that is opinion, is reviews of films and cds and books.
Molly is covering all the above and getting paid(well) for a movie review, of politics or whatever.
Molly is a very experienced journalist and filmmaker and deserves the job and the money.
But as far back as when HuffPo started, they have paid their journalists and let Bill Maher or Alec Baldwin or leftie of the day write what they want without pay because it’s a forum for them to have millions read them.
Several people posting here, or for that matter, the blog mistress, Kat, are qualified to review books, (Aunt B, too) but you have to apply. nm would make a wonderful writer on History.
That position is now filled with HuffPo, but there are tons of others who are paying and you might want to contact them to get paid to review books. or write about History.