Maybe back before the economic crisis, it was an annoying quirk that Arianna Huffington didn't pay her 1,000 bloggers/aggregators/whatevers for their content. Now? It's an actual problem, because besides a couple celebrity bloggers and political figures, The Huffington Post doesn't need original content. It needs aggregation, and will get it by any means necessary.

“It’s ridiculous that Ariana Huffington doesn’t find a way to pay people like me,” Felsenthal continues. “And you know what—she’s not going to. She doesn’t need to. What really makes the site go are the news stories put up there. There are people my daughters’ age”—mid-20s—“who instead of going to the New York Times site they go there and get all their opinions confirmed. The stories are all pro-Obama. They lift them from the AP or Reuters or the Times or the Washington Post.”

We'd all love to think our opinions and essays about politics are worth something in the blogosphere, but opinion pieces rarely draw in the big page-views if you are a nobody. So get out there and actually find an original story to cover, refuse to post it anywhere on the Internet so aggregators can't link to it, and demand a ransom for your newsworthy item. And that's how you do in 2009, y'all.