Boring Blogger Fired From Huffington Post
An otherwise uninteresting (to me) story about Peter Rost’s ouster from HuffPo after getting into a squabble with the site’s tech staff, contains this explanation from Arianna Huffington:
“It seemed like his blog was becoming about personal grudges,” Ms. Huffington said. “That would have been no problem if the posts were interesting.”
Since the second sentence completely negates the first, she should simply have said, “We fired him because he was boring.”
Thankfully, most bloggers are self-employed or a lot more would be out of work.
UPDATE: Rost has his own blog, cleverly named “Dr. Peter Rost,” on Blogspot wherein he details his version of events and a whole lot more including a photo of Arianna Huffington’s ass.
This kind of reminds me of Woody Allen’s line in Annie Hall: “The food is really terrible and the portions are too small”.
Nonsense.
Boring was not his offense.
His offense was that he disagreed with the status quo of Arianna Huffington and company.
Actually there is more to this than a disagreement between Dr. Rost and HuffPo. HuffPo is passing it off as this, but as you yourself point out, Ms. Huffington contradicts herself in her own statement. There is something else HuffPo is actively hoping no-one will talk about and, not surprisingly, it has to do with money.
Further, nearly 80% or more (this is not an exact figure I admit, but you can see for yourself) of the reader’s comments to Jonah Peretti’s and Ms. Huffington’s posts on the issue are for Dr. Rost and very much against HuffPo.
Even worse, Dr. Rost has the web traffic reports from HuffPo showing that he was consistently the #1 read post or within the top 5 posts each week.
So why would a fully grown, supposedly intelligent adult like Ms. Huffington side with a snooty, sarcastic and insulting 25 year old tech manager and fire a well-respected (among her own audience) doctor? The reason is clear based on the blog at MAXPOWER. Go to http://peterrost.blogspot.com and check the link to MAXPOWER.
It took me a while to understand it but a blogger like yourself will have no problem. Clearly, the co-founder of HuffPo, Mr. Peretti is not a “liberal” or “progressive” but the current king of viral marketing. HuffPo has recently entered into a deal with JWT, a major marketing firm, for big bucks obviously, to undertake a major marketing campaign. Part of that campaign, from what we can see at MAXPOWER, involves activities exactly like what happened to Dr. Rost. i.e. individuals at HuffPo, or employed by HuffPo, covertly (without disclosure) attempting to spread the web videos at the center of this marketing campaign. Now while this is probably not illegal it is certainly done in a way that would piss off the vast majority of HuffPo readers if they knew about it.
All of the major players in this marketing scheme, apart from Mr. Peretti himself, seem to be using the same IP address that Yaco-Mink (the employee at HuffPo proven to be harassing Dr. Rost) used when he made his multiple insulting comments to the Dr.
It seems to me that a good possibility is that Yaco-Mink was operating under the full knowledge of his bosses when he acted against Dr. Rost since it was fully in keeping in what they were doing re: the viral marketing campaign. Clearly they cannot fire him if he was doing their bidding – he would take them down for sure.
Now I’m not saying that when Yaco-Mink harassed Dr. Rost (this is not in dispute) this was “part” of the viral marketing strategy. That may or may not be the case. But I am suggesting that Yaco-Mink’s actions, i.e. pretend to be an “ordinary” reader and post comments intended to sway opinion, seems to be par for the course behind the scenes at HuffPo.
Further proof of that is that Mr. Peretti declared that Mr. Yaco-Mink’s action re: Dr. Rost was a “minor faux pas”. Would you or any of your readers say that the Tech Manager and sysadmin of a blog & comment site posting insulting remarks without disclosure was a “minor faux pas”?
Let’s also remember that this is the site… And the proprietor who gave us the George Clooney blog which turned out to be nothing of the sort.
This doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies about the credibility of their statements of defense, now.