The best possible scenario is that readers get used to seeing your name on the Huffington Post, so they return for your future posts. Great. You don't get paid for them either.
Can you point out even one success from this platform? Someone who started out on HuffPo and has become successful?
Anecdotal example: I'm essentially a nobody but was approached by a literary agent after a HP blog post.
Well you'd be wrong; writing on there regularly lands people on political talk shows and helps them gain visibility as a writer.
so yeah, the writer wants your business and what they offered was them complaining that they had a job offer that did not pay.
It will be actions other than free market ones that will allow or not the survival of journalism. Hope they will get it before they die.
Huffpo is just like TV.It's to make people's brain ready for the 5 minutes of ads during and after each show.
The OP should take advantage of it and not take that content farm seriously,because it's garbage anyway.
By the way: I assume you're a developer of some sort, since you're reading Hacker News. I need an app developed. My start-up has raised a few million in funding, but we can't pay you with money. Writing code is clearly something you're passionate about, and giving you an outlet for that passion should be compensation enough.
My e-mail's on my profile page. Please reach out!
Writers are unfortunately caught up in one of these free-market tornadoes, and to survive, they need to transform.
The author, instead of looking at this as "writing for free", should look at this as an opportunity to create his personal platform. HuffPo is paying him by giving access to their audience. It is up to him to take advantage of that. Yes, it's not easy, but it's reality.