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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Thelma Adams on Why She’s Joining the HuffPo Strike

Writer Thelma Adams has a piece up explaining why she’s joined the writer’s strike against HuffPo/AOL. I’m glad she decided to write this, because I think it’s important for people like Thelma to put their faces out there and say, I was one of those writers who helped make Arianna Huffington rich, and this is why I’m on strike. And if you are such a person and you do write such a piece, email me with the URL, because I want to continue putting faces to the story of HuffPo’s exploitation of writers.

Thelma Adams is not some hack, or an amateur blogger. She’s a professional writer, the film critic for USA Today Us Weekly, two time chair of the New York Film Critics Circle. She’s been published in The New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, Maire Claire. Her novel, Playdate, was recently published by St. Martin’s Press. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia.

And by the bye? Nowhere on Thelma Adams’ bio page at HuffPo does it tell readers that the piece they are enjoying reading by her was NOT PAID FOR BY HUFFINGTON POST.

I’m not linking to the bio page because I’m not sending hits their way. If you want to look it up, knock yourself out.

It’s a misconception that all of the writers who wrote for HuffPo for free are a bunch of amateurs who should just be grateful for the exposure. Even if it was true, there’s just not a world for me where building your media empire on the backs of thousands of unpaid laborers and then cashing a $315 million payday for yourself while demeaning the very people who built that empire for you is okay.

It’s a shit thing to do, and Arianna Huffington is reprehensible to me. I’m talking Sarah Palin-level reprehensible (apologies if you like Palin, but for me she’s practically the Antichrist, or at the least a heralding sign of the coming zombie apocalypse).

SUPPORT THE WRITERS’ STRIKE. BOYCOTT AOL/HUFFINGTON POST.

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7 Responses to “Thelma Adams on Why She’s Joining the HuffPo Strike”

  1. Thelma Adams says:

    I’m the film critic at Us Weekly, but otherwise Kim is right on. It’s important to put faces to the strike, and understand both the motivation to write for HuffPo and why it’s such a seedy betrayal for her to snatch millions off of our intellectual property.

    http://thelmadams.com/wordpress/?p=1019

  2. Proman says:

    “I was one of those writers who helped make Arianna Huffington rich, and this is why I’m on strike.”

    Let me get this straight, Thelma. You are boycotting HP because its creator is not “sharing the wealth” which, in turn, makes you feel “burned”.

    I just have to ask, did Arianna actually make any promises AT ANY TIME to share any profits associated with the site? I’m guessing she didn’t and if she did, I’m yet to see any mention of that. All I’m hearing here is that she had a (diverse) group of writers who were perfectly willing to be be utilized and made money off of them. I sympathize but the willing part gets in the way of my lending my complete support.

    You may dislike the way the woman made her wealth. I get that, totally. It IS pretty opportunistic. But it must have been ok by you BEFORE since you accepted not being paid and wrote anyway. Logic dictates that for that to happen you must have gotten at least something out of it to continue writing. Heck, you even say as much (“Sometimes I wanted to interview an actress that wasn’t in the Us Weekly or Marie Claire demographic. Sometimes I wanted to write a Mommy Essay that didn’t end in an uplifting nugget, and so got rejected at the usual paying outlets”). As far as I’m concerned THAT was your payment. If it wasn’t enough – and I agree that it wasn’t – you should have brought it up before. It’s not Arianna’s fault that you went along with her unfair terms. You were the ones who made her rich, and as far as I’m concerned, you were content with that. And if you were content, then why couldn’t see profit? It was her site to sell. Not to mention that SOMEONE should have seen the money coming from a mile away and brought it up beforehand. That’s the cost of being shortsighted in a sadisticly capitalistic market (I’m not a fan either but that’s how it’s been set up).

    How can you feel burned by something that was never promised to you in the first place? I hate to say this, it is now you who come off as opportunistic.

    If I am wrong, and Arianna did promise you money should the site be sold then take her to court. Don’t just complain about it. Do something about it. OTHERWISE…

    Otherwise, you can divorce yourself from the site but as far as I can tell you have no basis for boycotting it.

    In case, it’s not clear 100%, I am sympathetic to you guys. I am not a fan of Arianna’s but my view is that the writers need to take at least some responsibility for what happened too. And I didn’t see you take any.

  3. Thelma Adams says:

    I feel I did take responsibility, Proman. You referenced the parts of my short essay on http://www.thelmadams.com/wordpress where I did. I’m all about owning up. That was my benefit. Writing what I wanted to write and getting a larger audience for it than my desk drawer. I get that. Nonetheless, I’m irked that I was unpaid and Arianna made millions. And that seems like some thing that you, Proman, sympathize with me on.

  4. Proman says:

    “I feel I did take responsibility, Proman.”

    I feel little of that. You claim that you were being exploited which seems to imply that you are putting all the blaim on Arianna. It sounds to me like you are trying to have it both ways.

    I’d be more sympathetic if you as an ex-HP writer had any problem with Arianna making money off of content published on other sites. That to me, is an exactly the same type of scenario, made worse by the fact that those writers had nothing to do at all with HP. But no, you only start calling for boycott when the situation starts concerning you, completely ignoring that the model of exploitation has been there all along.

    How then can you boycott that?

    I feel terrible how the above sounds by the way, as I do not put all the blame on you either. I just feel like it’s a point worth making.

    (That’s, again not to say I do not feel for you as I as believe you shouldn’t have been put in this kind of situation in the first place. Sadly, I just feel like what Arianna did is not much different from what happens everywhere).

  5. Kim Voynar says:

    Sorry Thelma, correction made. I plead guilty of staying up to write when I needed to be asleep. 🙂

  6. Kim Voynar says:

    Proman,

    You make some excellent points, many of which are reasons why I never wrote for HuffPo myself. The whole idea of it — “Hey, we’ll LET you work for us for FREE! Aren’t we swell?” smacked of bullshit from the minute HuffPo was conceived.

    I worked for AOL for almost four years for way less than I should have as it was, for the sake of building a solid resume that’s allowed me to succeed in a very competitive field, and the only way I justified even that to myself was by calculating the money they paid for me to travel to fests as a part of my compensation.

    Which, in fairness, it was — they paid for me to be able to travel to and cover fests extensively, which in turn helped build my reputation. After a while, though, dealing with the AOL BS on a regular basis got to be too much, and I saw the writing on the wall for the way things would go down eventually.

    As for the HuffPo writers: Yes, they do have to accept a certain degree of responsibility for allowing HuffPo to exploit their work. For me, the tipping point here is that Arianna took their work without paying them, and THEN turned around and sold what she’d built on their backs for $315 million, and THEN refuses to acknowledge that the work those individual writers did has any merit whatsoever.

    Arianna would like the world to believe that the writers she didn’t pay are nothing but a pack of talentless hacks. My aim in linking to Thelma’s piece on her own choice to join the strike is to show the world that a lot of the people who write for HuffPo are professionals like her.

    Being a writer for a living, in many ways, just sucks. It’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks, to write thoughtfully and intelligently day after day after day. Most writers I know across various disciplines actually hate the process of writing, and yet we can’t seem to stop. The pay is, for the most part, crap. A lot of good writers take jobs writing for publications like Us Weekly or USA Today or People because those are some of the few jobs that actually pay decently, with benefits, even if the publications themselves are mediocre and we don’t believe in what they stand for, necessarily. That’s the reality.

    But Thelma is one face of the reality around HuffPo, and I felt it was important to share her story.

  7. Thelma Adams says:

    Go Kim: “As for the HuffPo writers: Yes, they do have to accept a certain degree of responsibility for allowing HuffPo to exploit their work. For me, the tipping point here is that Arianna took their work without paying them, and THEN turned around and sold what she’d built on their backs for $315 million, and THEN refuses to acknowledge that the work those individual writers did has any merit whatsoever.”
    Amen, sister.
    http://www.thelmadams.com/wordpress (for which I also make no money but, hey, it has my name on it)

Politics

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon