

The Huffington Post, a venture-capital-backed new media site that mixes links to other sites content with hundreds of celebrity and volunteer blogger posts, is being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content.

Whet Moser, an editor at alternata]ive weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post's newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago.

Compare for example, the Chicago Reader's Amanda Palmer review and The Huffington Post's (screenshots if the pages change: Reader, The Huffington Post)

Moser writes:

You want to do a post that says, "According to Jessica Hopper, Bon Iver rules, check 'em out, go here for the info," fine. But taking an entire concert preview is bush league. Doing it as a practice is just beneath contempt. If the future of journalism–which everyone keeps telling me The Huffington Post represents — is a bunch of search-engine optimization scams, we have bigger problems than Sam Zell's bad investment strategies.

But The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti says the contretemps are overblown — that the complete re-printing was a mistaken editorial call and that The Huffington Post's intention in aggregating other publications' content is to send traffic their way.

"You tease, you pull out a piece of it, and then you have a headline or link out," Peretti said. "Generally publishers are psyched to have a link."

The headlines on The Huffington Post, he points out, link to the outside site, not to The Huffington Post page with the two to three paragraph excerpt of the other site's copyrighted story. That page is accessible via the comment and "Quick Read" links, and serves as the "anchor" page for comments or for follow-up reporting by The Huffington Post staff.

Almost all of the readers click on the headlines and photos, according to Peretti, which means most don't know the excerpt page exists since they get sent to the original site.

He compares The Huffington Post's

influence on other sites traffic to that of link-voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Those sites, along with Google News and Slashdot, rely on small excerpts or user submitted summaries of online content in order to create lists of the best new content on the web.

But none of those aggregation sites, including Google News, uses as much of a percentage of copyrighted content as The Huffington Post does.

The Huffington Post, which launched in May 2005, drew 19 million unique visitors in November through the efforts of 27 editorial staff members, according to a spokesman. There's just one editor for the

Chicago-focused project, which launched in August. The company just closed a $25 million funding round a few weeks ago.

Moser isn't alone in his sentiments against The Huffington Post's aggregation tactics. Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker and other semi-famous blogs, hates the Huffington Post .

Kevin Allman, a New Orleans journalist and editor of Gambit Weekly, finds The Huffington Post's idea of starting a whole series of city-focused aggregation sites hypocritical, especially given the site is named after Arianna Huffington, a popular, and now-liberal-leaning columnist.

In other words: professional newsgathering organizations have paid professional writers to do professional work, and then

Arianna comes in, creates links to their creations, and sells ads on her own page. How progressive.

But Peretti says some 95

percent of The Huffington Post's traffic goes through the headline links, and that when The Huffington Post does original reporting or adds to a story, it changes a headline link to point to its content.

Otherwise, the Chicago project picks the 'best' stories from publications like the Chicago Tribune, the Sun Times and the Chicago Reader.

As for disgruntled publishers, Peretti seems genuinely perplexed and says The Huffington Post links should be good for them — and suggests that upset editors get in touch and build relationships with

Huffington Post editors.

Note: This piece originally linked to Gawker piece by Ryan Tate about the same issue, hyperlinked in the sentence "Nick Denton hates The Huffington Post". It has been removed in order to clear up any interpretation that Tate hates The Huffington Post or was told to write his post.

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