How much money does Daily Beast media columnist Howard Kurtz make? We don’t know!
Business Insider editor Henry Blodget doesn’t know either, but that’s not stopping him from writing about it.
Established journalists are raking in plenty of dough now, he posits, because ambitious web outfits like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post poach print stars at a premium.
The figures we’ve heard–which for understandable reasons are causing jaws to drop all around the New York Times and other mainstream media newsrooms–are as follows:
Howard Kurtz (Daily Beast): $600,000 a year
Tim O’Brien (Huffington Post): $400,000 a year
Peter Goodman (Huffington Post): $300,000 a year
Which would be cool for them, if it it’s true. No one Blodget contacted even came close to confirming those numbers.
“So we don’t know whether these numbers are accurate, and they may well be wildly-inflated figments of remaining mainstream-media staffers’ hyper-active imaginations,” Blodget admits.
But the speculative figures make sense, he argues, because the web, like TV, fosters a market of star commentators who “will one day be paid their weight in gold.”
We’ll keep at it, then.
kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel
