Peter Daou (who worked on new media for the presidential campaigns of both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton) and media consultant James Boyce are suing Huffington Post founders Ken Lerer and Arianna Huffington:
“Huffington has styled herself as a ‘new media’ maven and an expert on the effective deployment of news and celebrity on the Internet in the service of political ends,” says the complaint. “As will be shown at trial, Huffington’s and Lerer’s image with respect to the Huffington Post is founded on false impressions and inaccuracies: They presented the ‘new media’ ideas and plans of Peter Daou and James Boyce as their own in order to raise money for the website and enhance their image, and breached their promises to work with Peter and James to develop the site together.”
The suit hinges on Huffington and Lerer’s refusal to give credit to the two strategists for coming up with the idea for the site and fleshing it out, despite an alleged handshake agreement. Huffington and Lerer responded, “For months now they have been trying to extract money from us. They are filing the lawsuit of course because we did not agree to any payment.”
Daou and Boyce both had written for HuffPo until recently, and said they only filed this suit after they realized they were never going to get any credit.
2 Dems claim Huffington stole website idea [Politico]
