Irony: Woman Who Didn't Pay Bloggers Elected to Committee to Protect Journalists

Seems like some people have extremely short memories.

When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.”

Some analyses in the mainstream media have echoed these sentiments. “To grasp The Huffington Post’s business model,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten, “picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”

That was back in February.

Fast forward to today.

Arianna Huffington's controversial standing among journalism's old guard didn't hamper her appointment to the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists last week.

Despite some industry snickering that an aggregator of journalists' work was now in the position of protecting them, CPJ sources mostly told us that the pros of adding Huffington to the board outweighed the cons.