On Arianna Huffington not paying writers:
I won’t write for free anymore. The idea that everybody’s writing for free is hurting writing as a profession. I wrote many articles for Arianna when she was establishing her aggregator blog and attracting all those eyeballs. When she got $300 million from the AOL acquisition, I said: ‘OK, Arianna, we all helped you get there so now you’re going to pay writers.’ She said, ‘No, I pay my editors.’ I’ve known Arianna for years. Before she married a gay billionaire, she was a writer—A poor. Greek. Writer.
I knew her when she was anti-feminist. I knew her when she was right wing. I knew her when she turned left wing. We promoted our first books together in the U.K. a million years ago. We did Politically Incorrect together ages ago. She’s full of beans! But I admire her energy. She can be very interesting and she’s very clever. But “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,†as Madeleine Albright once said. Artists who turncoat and exploit other artists—I have no words.
Arianna ditched the writers soon enough. That hurts. Writing is a craft and an art, not a freebie like a prize in a Cracker Jack box. It is not like chatting on TV. As the former President of the Authors Guild, I discovered how dire the earning power of authors can be. Now authors are blogging everywhere for free, and it’s not a good development. They are starving. I care about artists—the oxygen of society. Suppress them and you asphyxiate discussion and change. Arianna was a writer once. Then she married an ambivalent gay billionaire and became part of the one percent. She forgot her origins. Writers are part of the 99 percent. We need to be paid! We cannot barter poems for food.