I think it is not exploitative if the authors knew it beforehand and agreed to it. They've got exposure as a compensation.
What I find more exploitative is their working method - often, they took some hard news (which is quite expensive to produce, requiring real reporter to go somewhere), and then their blogger (siting at home in pajamas) took the best quotes and facts from that article, wrote some quick fluff around those quotes and hola!, we have content.
Yes, this is essentially what blogging is about, and if someone does this as an amateur to express his opinion, that's ok. But I feel it is a bit exploitative to make business out of work of journalists working for other media.
the worse part is seeing Huffington post valued at $330m, while the New York Times market cap is "only" 1.64B. The NYT company does investigations, produces photography and video, has foreign bureaus etc.
For me, this means there's more value rehashing content than producing original content
What I find more exploitative is their working method - often, they took some hard news (which is quite expensive to produce, requiring real reporter to go somewhere), and then their blogger (siting at home in pajamas) took the best quotes and facts from that article, wrote some quick fluff around those quotes and hola!, we have content.
Yes, this is essentially what blogging is about, and if someone does this as an amateur to express his opinion, that's ok. But I feel it is a bit exploitative to make business out of work of journalists working for other media.