As a former Huffington Post contributor myself, I wouldn't mind getting a share of the $105 million class action lawsuit Jonathan Tasini is filing on behalf of exploited, unpaid bloggers like me. I mean, The Stranger only pays marginally more than Huffington Post, so, well, I could really use the money.

That said, I agree with Eli, in that as a writer giving away my work for free, I knew exactly what I was getting. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. At least in direct monetary compensation.

But it wasn't exactly a one-way street. Arianna Huffington got free content from folks like me, and in exchange I got a larger audience and a slightly enhanced national profile. Furthermore, the bulk of my eighty-some posts at HuffPo were cross-posts, so they didn't take much extra work, and they all linked back to HA, both bumping my traffic, and more importantly, my Google ranking.

All in all, not an entirely bad deal for me, and no hard feelings. It would have been nice if Arianna had shared the wealth of her AOL windfall with those of us who helped make it possible, if only a token gesture. You know, like a buck or two a post. Or maybe a gift certificate to Olive Garden. But I wasn't expecting it.

In fact, if I have any ambivalence (if not downright regrets) over my career as a blogger, it's got more to do with the way I sold myself cheap at my own blog, rather than the eyes-wide-open arrangement I had at HuffPo. For six years I obsessively covered Washington state and local politics for free, mostly full-time. How could that not help but contribute to the devaluation of the profession, negatively impacting not only my own finances, but those of my colleagues in the legacy press? It wasn't a role I set out to play—and it's one aspect of my contribution to the transformation of local journalism of which I'm not proud. Unpaid bloggers like me, grabbing headlines and readers, just didn't make it any easier for other writers to demand a living wage... for example, my new coworkers here at The Stranger who once were paid to merely put out a weekly paper, but who since have assumed the added Sisyphean burden of keeping the Slog fresh with content.

And in that sense, Tasini and I are as guilty as Arianna.