Should journalists and bloggers work for free?

Making enough money online can be a challenge for a major news organisation, and if you are an independent blogger then there are very few ways of earning anything from your site.

Perhaps this is why Arianna Huffington's The Huffington Post manages to obtain high quality content from a range of contributors who all offer their work for no financial recompense, but simply the chance to be published by a larger organisation.

Nowadays, this type of unpaid contribution is par for the course - user generated content is widely embraced as one of the best methods of engaging with an audience, whilst crowd sourcing is being used by many organisations, for all types of purposes, including reputable academic research.

However, the professional design community was outraged by HuffPo's competition to design an icon for their political coverage. As Poynter reported, The American Institute of Graphic Arts felt that the wording of the competition undermined the skill of good design - a skill which comes at a price.

It's not just the AIGA who have been feeling a little anti-Arianna of late. One UK company has based a whole ad campaign around it, in response to HuffPost's recent UK expansion.

Messagespace is a company that aims to provide smaller news/politics/current affairs blogs with a means of financially supporting their work though advertising revenues. The company is aiming to sign up 300 smaller blogging sites, whose pages attract at least 1000 views per day.

As The Guardian reports, they say offer an alternative way of supporting bloggers, allowing them to free themselves from the comparative 'exploitation' The Huffington Post. Hence, their advertising campaign leads with 'Ariana Huffington doesn't value bloggers'.

Whilst Messagespace provides a welcome opportunity for independent writers to gain some financial rewards for their efforts, is The Huffington Post really exploiting writers (whose work has the potential for massive exposure through the site)? Or is the culture of unpaid journalism - via un-monetised online content, unpaid internships and user-generated content - become an acceptable, unavoidable norm?

Sources: Ancient Lives (University of Oxford), The Guardian , Poynter