You’re right. She doesn’t pay any of the bloggers who appear on her site, and has no plans to pay them. For some (most?) of her bloggers, the exposure on one of the most popular sites on the Internet is enough, but I wonder how long that will last.

There is bound to come a day when those bloggers will wonder why she should make money off of their intellectual property and not share any of that cash.

When I ran BostonNOW, we told our bloggers upfront that we would not pay them initially, as we were not making money yet and hadn’t proven the model. But I was already meeting with the National Writers Guild to discuss working together to create blogger contracts as well as methods and amounts of payment, especially for those bloggers we excerpted in the paper (as that reflected a judgment on our part of their value).

I’ll wager that when Arianna launches her local sites, she’ll be able to pull in a large share of the local bloggers without paying them for two reasons: 1) Fame, just like the bloggers on her national site, and 2) The local metro daily won’t publish them, leaving them no choice but Huffington for mass exposure.

We’ll find out very soon in Chicago…

http://www.nj.com/hobokennow/

http://www.nj.com/morristown/

http://www.nj.com/newark/

Signs indicate that they aren’t stopping there. Other places will likely be added. Also, they tend to be a mix between beat reporters, local citizens and community activists, which means that the quality of the writing tends to be more focused than the usual motley group of paranoid bloggers who write things like “omgzors! bUsH is signing away our sovereignty to the NAFTA highway!” or “Obama wants to turn America into a radical muslim sect.”

However, these blogs usually don’t get printed, as far as I know. And Huffington certainly has more “street cred” among bloggers. She’s not the establishment, which gives her a little bit of an advantage.