Nice Child Thrown Under Bus at Huffington Post

Two days ago it became known that, a month ago, a youngster at the Huffington Post did a terrible job “summarizing” an Ad Age thing, and the Ad Age writer (Awl pal Simon Dumenco) reasonably beefed about the amount of taking versus linking, and the Huffington Post… suspended their writer indefinitely. This is along the lines of arresting hookers instead of johns, or drug users instead of drug importers, or something. The writer, who seems to be Yale class of (something fairly recent), Amy Lee, was doing pretty much what she’d been trained to do, either overtly or covertly, and she took the fall for the HuffPo, which is so obviously baloney. Isn’t it bad enough that she has a terrible job, writing up news blurbs that no one reads (part of Ad Age’s complaint is that the Huffington Post didn’t actually send any traffic, but it’s obvious from the HuffPo page that barely anyone saw that particular page, unlike some of her other aggregations on other boring topics), when her real-world interests are actually opera, contemporary classical music, poetry and art films.

So the Huffington Post thinks it gets off clean from these entrenched practices by temporarily canning a smart young person who’s doing one of their terrible jobs as a way to get into writing and as a way to pay bills. It shouldn’t.