Arianna Huffington to Unemployed: Blog for Me

Lost your job? Huff wants you to "blog the meltdown" - for free

By ELIZABETH BOUGEROL

Updated 2:33 PM EST, Thu, Dec 4, 2008

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If you caught last night's Daily Show, you know three things about Arianna Huffington:

She told Jon Stewart: "You don't understand blogging."
She sees a huge upside to the mass layoffs of Recession '08: More time to blog!
She thinks you should blog for her, specifically, about being laid off -- and do so for free! At the Huffington Post! It'll be cathartic, she says! "Blog the meltdown," she calls it!

You kind of have to admire the Macy's Parade balloon-sized pair of cojones on everyone's favorite Greek redhead. Blogging, in La Huff's view, is something you do for her website for free so she can get more venture capital dollars. Or should we say, the last venture capital dollars.

She just landed $25 million in funding for her website -- more than a little impressive in this investment-unfriendly economy -- but the author of the just-released Complete Guide To Blogging (who famously enlists people to supply the site with content sans pay) isn't planning on spending that cash on writers anytime soon (it'll get funneled to things like "technology and infrastructure" and expanding its "in-house advertising capabilities," among other things).

Hilariously, Gawker has a page full of Twittered reactions -- most of them irate -- to the Huff-Stewart exchange. Which just goes to show that people will absolutely blog for free if you push the right buttons.