Join us at 12 noon Saturday, May 19 for “Thriving as a Freelancer,” a talk with three former newsroom staffers — a reporter, a blogger and a photographer — whose careers have flourished despite the competitive market.

We meet at the Lafayette Library in the Arts and Science Discovery Center, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd., only three blocks from BART. The Lafayette BART station has bike storage, so no need to drive.

Heading up our panel is Barbara Hernandez, whose client list includes the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, AOL Money & Finance, PBS.org, LATPTOPmag.com, TheRacapp.com, the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, and numerous national and regional magazines.

Admission is free. For more information or to reserve seating, email freelance@mediaworkers.org.

Dissed again.

This time, it’s cartoonist Garry Trudeau knocking the Huffington Post for paying writers in “exposure.”

Trudeau is in good company: The Huffington Post has been dissed by the best, from Chris Hedges to Stephen Colbert. The first editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize, the Doonesbury creator was just named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine.

In a Doonesbury strip published April 9, first in a series highlighting the twisted economics of online media, laid-off reporter Rick Redfern gets a call from the Huffington Post with an invitation to join the ranks of its unpaid bloggers.

“We think you’d be a perfect fit at the Huffington Post, Rick,” says a voice at the other end of the phone line.

“And why is that?” asks Rick, sitting at his computer. “Are you under the impression I’m looking for unpaid work?”

“OK, so we don’t compensate bloggers, but it would be great exposure,” the caller says.

“Exposure?” says Rick. “Can I eat exposure? Can I smoke it?”

No hard feelings, said HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim, a self-described “big Doonesbury fan.”

“I thought it was funny,” he said. “Good comedy is often unfair, and that’s ok.”

Bloggers howled: “A riot,” said one who asked to remain nameless.

“It takes someone like Gary Trudeau to illustrate the absurdities and contradictions of the Huffington Post,” said former blogger Molly Secours, whose posts on racial disparities in education, employment and criminal justice drew hundreds of comments on the HuffPost site.

The strip was “well timed,” Secours noted. A judge just threw out a lawsuit by bloggers seeking compensation for work which they say helped beef up the value of the Huffington Post to $315 million when sold to AOL.

The Post launched seven years ago with a business plan that factored in the free contributions of writers. In 2011, shortly after AOL sealed the purchase, and threw in a $4 million annual salary for Ms. Huffington, our Guild Freelancers unit and the national Guild-CWA launched the “Hey Arianna, Can You Spare a Dime?” campaign.

The boycott drew hundreds of supporters and changed — we hope for good — the expectation that journalists working online don’t deserve to be paid. Huffington brass eventually agreed to meet with Guild president Bernie Lunzer and organizing director Tim Schick.

And the so-called “Internet newspaper” won a Pulitzer of its own last week for “Beyond the Battlefield,” David Wood’s 10-part series on the struggles of veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wood, at least, is one of the site’s paid staff. The HuffPost nominated unpaid blogger Mayhill Fowler for her coverage of the presidential campaign, prompting Secours to ask, “Her work was worthy of a Pulitzer but not payment?”

Grim, the HuffPost bureau chief, “had mentioned her ‘Off the Bus’ project as an example of her commitment to developing journalists,” Schick said after an early meeting. “I just checked it out and it’s exactly what we don’t support: Journalists writing for free.”

Turns out designers didn’t want to work for free, either, as the HuffPost discovered after launching a contest asking volunteers to submit proposals for a new logo (“Have a cool idea for a logo that screams “awesome political coverage?”), raising the ire of the American Institute of Graphic Arts among others.

“Professional designers have finally had it with the Huffington Post always asking for free shit all the time,” Ryan Tate wrote in Gawker.  “You’re a publicly traded company now, HuffPo. You can design your own damned logo for politics coverage.”

The Huffington Post’s penny-pinching practices have provided lively fodder for comics.

Stephen Colbert launched “The Colbuffington Re-Post,” in which he posted the entire contents of the Huffington Post (“Arianna, if I find a buyer, I promise to give you the same cut you’re giving me” – nothing).

And Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers drew howls at the 2011 White HousePress Correspondents’ Dinner: “The Huffington Post party is asking people to go to other parties first and just steal their food and drinks to bring back from there.”

If the jokes show no sign of abating, that suggests a resolution is in order, said Lunzer.

“The only thing I’m certain of is that we need to organize them.”

by Bill Snyder

As a tech writer and consumer advocate, I’m frequently critical of monopolistic practices that drive up prices and lessen competition. But the brouhaha over e-books, and a lawsuit against Apple by the Department of Justice, turns that logic on its head.

Simply put, consumers are better off if the price of books, e-books or paper, doesn’t hit rock bottom. Sure, no one likes to pay more, but if you want a good product, it has to be worth someone’s time and trouble to produce it and then sell it.

Read the full story.

Bill Snyder is a tech writer. His column, Consumer Tech Radar, appears on the website CIO. Bill is also the vice chair of Guild Freelancers.

Law 'unforgivable, unconstitutional, dangerous'

Journalists and activists supporting Chris Hedges’ lawsuit against the U.S. government are soon to be joined by Naomi Wolf.

Hedges, an author and former New York Times war correspondent , filed his class-action suit Jan. 12 in a U.S. District Court, saying provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act pose an “unprecedented threat to civil liberties” and to rigorous reporting.  Hedges v. Obama claims sections of the act are written so broadly that journalists reporting on terrorism, who must interview individuals on all sides of the issue, not only become vulnerable to arrest but could be subject to  indefinite detention.

In fact, it is already casting a frost, writes Wolf in her Guardian article “The reason I’m helping Chris Hedges’ lawsuit against the NDAA.” Wolf, expected to sign on as a plaintiff, backed off an interview with WikiLeaks founder  Julian Assange, fearful of the fallout.

Writer Naomi Wolf is soon to join the suit.

Wolf has tapped elected officials whose views span the political spectrum, and all agree the act could hamstring American journalists, she writes.

Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg, MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky and author Cornel West have already joined the suit. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore rallied supporters outside a New York courtroom March 29 after a day of testimony but it was unclear whether or not he planned to sign on.

The nation has seen a “transpartisan outpouring of citizen horror over this law,” the co-plaintiffs write on their new website.

Read the International Business Times summary and the most recent coverage by the New American.

Hedges called the NDAA “unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous,” and has said the U.S. will “cease to be a constitutional democracy” if it does not junk the law, signed by the president Dec. 31.

“Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law,” Hedges writes in his March 26 Truthdig column.  “They make legal what was once illegal.”

Such constraints are always instituted “in the name of national security,” the column says.

The court has yet to determine whether the plaintiffs have legal standing to initiate a legal proceeding against the federal government. They must document a “reasonable fear” that the legislation will deny them their First Amendment rights.

Also joining the suit are Icelandic M.P. Birgitta Jonsdottir, Alexa O’Brien of U.S. Day of Rage and civil liberties advocate Jennifer Bolen.

In addition to the president, defendants include  Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Attorney General Eric Holder, House Speaker John Boehner, Arizona Senator John McCain and others.

The forces that conspired to imprison blogger Josh Wolf pose a continuing threat to journalists, First Amendment Project attorney Jim Wheaton told an audience at a Pacific Media Workers Guild event Tuesday.

The Guild freelance unit hosted “Activist Blogger: the Josh Wolf Story,” a video and panel discussion including Wolf, Wheaton, and filmmaker Donna Lee.

Wolf spent 226 days at the federal detention center in Dublin between August 2006 and April 2007 – an experience he describes as “more boring than brutal” — for refusing to surrender raw video footage and give testimony to a federal grand jury about a Mission District demonstration in July 2005.

One of the questions asked the panel was how the federal government came to be involved, thus skirting the protections of the state’s shield law.

A police car was burned that night and an officer badly hurt, but at the time Wolf was filming a tense confrontation between police and demonstrators over the restraint of a man who had been thrown to the ground (an officer can be seen pressing his foot onto the man’s neck). The state’s shield law barred San Francisco police from demanding the footage, which they hoped to use to  identify participants.

However, law enforcement made the case that because a federal grant helped pay for police cars, including the one that burned, the FBI had jurisdiction.

The lack of a federal Shield Law continues to make journalists vulnerable to subpoena, searches and seizures– an issue unlikely to be resolved given the heightened rhetoric accompanying the “war on terror,” Wolf told the audience at the San Francisco Public Library.

Much of the film focuses on the debate over who is a journalist, with San Francisco Chronicle editor John Diaz comparing Wolf favorably to the publishers of the nation’s early broadsheets, and critics such as conservative columnist Deb Saunders branding Wolf “a journalist in his own mind” since he was not the employee of a news gathering organization and bound to a set of standards including impartiality.

“By that standard neither Michael Moore nor Michael Pollan are journalists,” Wheaton said. “I never want to hear the question again, are bloggers journalists.”

The mantle belongs to anyone who gathers information, compiles it in a format that is transmissible and disseminates it to a “willing audience,” he said.

The issue is timely, given the increasing number of news professionals working as freelancers. Oakland police recently arrested political cartoonist Susie Cagle while she covered an Occupy demonstration,  dismissing her freelance media credentials as ersatz.

Not all the news about news gatherers is bad, Wheaton said. A California Supreme Court ruling gutted a law that required law enforcement to seek a search warrant before searching a reporter’s cell phone , but then was trumped by legislation. Written by state Sen. Mark Leno, the law sailed through the Assembly on a unanimous vote.

Lee, who met Wolf during his run for mayor of San Francisco (he snagged 2,000 votes), shot “Activist Blogger” in about three weeks. The film is finding favor at journalism and law schools, where it engenders lively discussions about constitutional protections and free speech issues.

Wolf eventually made a deal with federal prosecutors. He agreed to share the footage, which he said showed nothing useful to them. In exchange, he did not have to testify.

Moderating the panel was journalist,  free speech activist and Guild freelance board member Rick Knee, who also appeared in the film.

From top: Josh Wolf, Jim Wheaton, Donna Lee. Bottom: Panelists display their new Pacific Media Workers Guild T-shirts. All photos by  Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal.

“Activist Blogger:

The Josh Wolf Story”

30-minute film and panel discussion on press freedom, Shield Law, and how we define journalism

5:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 3

San Francisco Main Library

Josh Wolf served 226 days of prison time in a federal penitentiary – most in solitary confinement — for refusing to surrender video he shot of a 2005 San Francisco rally to law enforcement. In the days of Occupy Wall Street, has much changed?

Panel: Filmmaker Donna Lee, Wolf, political cartoonist Susie Cagle (arrested while covering Occupy Oakland) and Jim Wheaton, senior attorney for the First Amendment project

Free admission/snack buffet

Email to reserve seating: freelance@mediaworkers.org

Latino Room A, Main Library, 100 Larkin St. at Grove

The Newspaper Guild/CWA Local 39521, AFL-CIO

415-421-6833

And one of the former NLRB members who received confidential information – former Chairman Peter Schaumber – is co-chair of the labor policy advisory group for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

In Team Romney’s alleged labor mole, Salon.com’s Josh Eidelson writes today that  the inspector general of the National Labor Relations Board is  probing allegations of improper conduct by NLRB member Terence Flynn.

The inspector general’s report details numerous instances of then-chief counsel Flynn funneling confidential information about the labor board’s activities and deliberations to two former NLRB members “who have been actively engaged in a relentless campaign to undermine and discredit the NLRB through legal and rhetorical challenges to the agency’s activities,” Trumka’s message says.

The report makes clear that Schaumber used his inside connections through his former chief counsel to get internal, confidential information that he then utilized in ongoing public attacks on the actions of the NLRB.

Trumka has called on Flynn to resign, the Department of Justice to bring criminal charges “if violations are found,” and Romney to dismiss Schaumber.

“Working people deserve to know that public officials who take an oath to honor the public trust will do so – and that is especially true for officials charged with protecting workers’ rights,” Trumka said in a prepared statement.

Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Hundreds of workers converged upon downtown San Francisco Friday to blow the whistle – literally and figuratively – on corporations that they say slash worker benefits and pay and outsource jobs while lavishing bonuses upon executives.

In particular, the Day of Action, which brought demonstrators out in cities across the U.S., trained its sights on Verizon Communications, where management and unions have been locked in a fight over benefits since a contract lapsed in August.

Verizon ranks No.16 among Fortune 500 companies, enjoying more than $106 billion in revenues and nearly $15 billion in operating profits.

In January, the company reported record revenues during the final quarter of 2011 and year-end revenues of $110.9 billion, up 4 percent from 2010 (Shares dropped, however, since its fourth-quarter revenues fell short of expectations by a penny).

But for 45,000 union workers, reports of those record earnings sting, said Libby Sayre, area director for CWA District 9.

Yup, he's part of the 99 percent too. Protect public employee workers' pensions!

“They are demanding huge take-backs in health care and pensions — $20,000 in give-backs per individual,” she said. “There is no economic necessity for that. They’re kicking the ranks of the working middle class into the ranks of the poor.”

Although the contract for the company’s Western states division will not be renegotiated until next year, workers from several unions flooded the streets in a raucous display of solidarity at 300 locations – 16 in California alone, said Katie Gjertson, senior field representative for the AFL-CIO.

In a march that began at Fifth and Market streets and paused outside a Verizon store on Market before moving onto a Wells Fargo bank, demonstrators carried red signs that read “We are the 99 percent” and “Verigreedy.”

Verizon workers, including members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), walked off the job last summer, but returned to work two weeks later after Verizon agreed to bargain for a fair contract.

Supporters say the company’s practices have thrown gas on the fire. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s pay jumped from $7.2 million in 2010 to $23.1 million last year, according to the company’s own records. And, the communications giant enjoys robust tax subsidies: $14 billion from 2008 to 2010.

“They’re one of the biggest corporate tax dodgers in the country,” Gjertson said.

Reached by phone, a company spokesman dismissed the claims as rhetoric. “The CEO salary is not what’s up for discussion,” said Rich Young, director of labor-related communications. “This is a protest to try to gain attention for some reason. It will have no impact whatsoever on our negotiations.”

Young said demonstrators fail to understand that Verizon’s business, landline communications, is nose-diving.

“We have to be competitive,” said Young. “This is a challenged business.”

The company asked its employees, whom Young said were among the highest paid nationally in their field, to begin making “a modest contribution” toward health coverage.

But those who turned out for today’s demonstration say workers in this company, throughout the communications field, and in industries throughout the nation are fighting to hold onto retirement and health benefits.

Such workers include Steve Levine, a CWA shop steward and 12-year veteran technician at AT&T, where talks have just begun.

“They want to take back 50 years of what we fought for,” he said. “They want to talk about a dress code. They don’t want to talk about retiree (benefits).”

Addie Brinkley, who retired after 40 years with AT&T in Modesto, agreed. “They don’t want to give us health care at all,” she said. “They are not giving me anything I didn’t work for.”

Olga Miranda, who heads up the SEIU 78 janitors unit, cheered the action, in which several unions worked in concert.

“We’re strong on our own,” she said as passing unit members hugged and high-fived. “But we kick ass together.”

Enlighten the public and promote the value of our work on the road and in cyberspace

…and win valuable prizes!

Bumper sticker: In 10 words or less, tell everyone on the road that journalism is worth paying for and that society cannot function without it.

Hashtag: Should lawyers, nurses and plumbers work for free? Should we have ” citizen urban planners” and oral surgeons? A spot-on hashtag will tweet our message far and wide. #chumpsworkforfree?

You need not be a member to enter. Send your entries to freelance@mediaworkers.org today!

Winners will be announced at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday April 3 at the film showing and panel discussion (“Activist Blogger”) in the  San Francisco Main Library Latino Room. 100 Larkin St.

NewsLab

Streaming video. YouTube. LiveStream.

If you don’t know much about them, you are missing a critical opportunity to tell  — and sell — your stories.

To help get members up to speed, the Freelancers unit is presenting a video boot camp consisting of two four-hour training sessions April 21 and April 22 in San Francisco.

Teaching the classes will be three accomplished Guild members with extensive experience shooting, editing and presenting video: Aaron Jacob Willman, Steve Zeltzer, and John Parulis.  Free handout materials will be provided.

The training will focus on gaining a hands-on understanding of the basics of live streaming video on the internet. The sessions will cover

• Computer and camera requirements.
• Setting up free accounts at UStream, Livestream, Justin and other streaming provider services.
• Walk through for getting your camera up and running, techniques and troubleshooting.
• Connectivity issues.- wi-fi, 4G, broadband connections.
• Importance of publicizing and using social network services.
• Archiving and saving streams.

Bring your own smartphone or point-and-shoot camera; any flavor is fine as long as they shoot video.

Donation: $10 a person for members; $20 for the public. Email  freelance@mediaworkers.org to reserve a space now.

Photo: Reporter Jason Whitely of WFAA-TV in Dallas shoots video with an iPhone.