By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, March 2011
In early March 2011, Bill Lasarow — publisher and co-editor of the LA-based Visual Art Source website — declared a strike against the Huffington Post over the platform’s continuing reliance on unpaid bloggers and syndicated content. The original FishbowlLA piece, by Matthew Fleischer, captured the moment when one of the unpaid-blogger ethics fights moved from background grumbling into formal-statement territory.
Then
Lasarow’s strike letter laid out two demands: a pay schedule for HuffPost contributors, and a clear separation between paid promotional material and editorial content. The framing was directly tied to the February 2011 AOL acquisition of HuffPost for $315 million — a transaction that had substantially enriched Arianna Huffington and the platform’s investor class while leaving the contributing-writer compensation structure unchanged.
The Visual Art Source declaration was structurally significant because it came from an LA-based publisher who had been one of the syndication partners HuffPost had been using to backfill its arts coverage. Lasarow’s position was that the dollars-versus-no-dollars question was now operationally untenable in a way it had not been before the AOL deal. The cultural-cannibalization argument — that HuffPost was extracting professional work without compensation from organizations bearing the cost of producing it — was the structural argument that the platform’s defenders had been working around for years.
The original FishbowlLA framing, by then-FBLA editor Matthew Fleischer, was straightforwardly sympathetic to Lasarow’s position. The piece included quotation from the Visual Art Source declaration on the ethical issues; the broader framing situated the strike within the larger HuffPost-AOL critique cycle that was building across LA-area media-industry coverage in early 2011.
Now
The broader unpaid-blogger debate that the Lasarow strike crystallized has been substantially resolved in favor of the critics’ position — HuffPost transitioned away from the platform-only unpaid-contributor model across the decade and a half since. The platform eventually narrowed its contributor program; by 2018 it had announced the end of the legacy contributor platform entirely.
Bill Lasarow continued at Visual Art Source for years after the 2011 strike. Visual Art Source has continued as an LA-based arts publication across the interval.
Arianna Huffington left HuffPost / AOL in 2016 to found Thrive Global. HuffPost itself was sold to BuzzFeed in November 2020 for stock; the property has been through additional rounds of layoffs and restructuring across the years since. The platform that Lasarow had been protesting in 2011 is structurally a different operation now, with materially different contributor economics.
Matthew Fleischer left FBLA after his 2011-2013 stint there. He went on to columns at the LA Times and other LA-area outlets across the years that followed. His March 2011 framing of the Lasarow strike was, in retrospect, one of the better-aged pieces of the broader HuffPost critique cycle — the structural argument it foregrounded turned out to be the one the industry eventually accepted.
The strike itself reads now as one of the small documented moments when the unpaid-blogger economic critique moved into formal-statement territory — a moment that helped reshape the broader platform-contributor economic conversation across the rest of the decade.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.