• Wired, Monday, December 22, 2008 11:30 AM

The Huffington Post, an immensely popular politico/media blog, has been accused of stealing content from a host of smaller online publications, Wired reports. Chicago Reader Editor Whet Moser claims the blog is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews by reprinting them on the HuffPo site to drive search engine traffic.

He also found other wholesale examples taken from The Onion and Time Out Chicago. Says Moser: "If the future of journalism -- which everyone keeps telling me The Huffington Post represents -- is a bunch of search-engine optimization scams, we have bigger problems than Sam Zell's bad investment strategies."

According to HuffPo co-founder Jonah Peretti, the wholesale reprinting was an editorial mistake. He says the true intention of aggregating other publications' editorial content is to send traffic their way. "You tease, you pull out a piece of it, and then you have a headline or link out," Peretti said. "Generally publishers are psyched to have a link." He compares HuffPo's influence on other sites' traffic to that of online voting sites like Digg or Reddit.

Read the whole story at Wired »