Huffington Post founders sued by consultants

Two Democratic political consultants are suing the co-founders of the Huffington Post, charging that the influential news, blog and community-building website was based on their ideas.

Peter Daou and James Boyce filed a lawsuit against Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer in a Manhattan court Monday. The two seek unspecified damages, but Boyce has said they would donate proceeds from the legal action to progressive causes and online writers.

According to Daou and Boyce, they devised the site's popular blend of content, which includes aggregated news articles from traditional media, opinion pieces written by notable figures, blogs written for free and original content by staffers.

The pair claim they — repeatedly and in great detail — discussed ideas for the project with Huffington and Lerer in the belief they would all be partners and even went so far as to contact a potential investor and suggest celebrity contributors, who later ended up writing for the site.

However, they were cut out before the site's launch in May 2005, according to the court documents filed.  

"The reality of Peter's and James's role in the conception and creation of the site has been erased from history, and Peter and James have never been compensated for their participation in the joint venture," says the lawsuit.

Huffington and Lerer have rejected the allegations, describing the pair  in a statement issued to U.S. news site Politico as "two political operatives who we rejected going into business with or hiring six years ago, and who had absolutely nothing to do with creating, running, financing or building the Huffington Post.

"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."

They added that Daou and Boyce were among about three dozen people invited to Huffington's home in December 2004 to discuss starting a political media organization. However, Huffington and Lerer said they declined to hire them.

The Huffington Post, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in May, landed on a Top 10 list of current-event and global-news websites this year after having recorded 13 million unique users in March — an increase of more than 94 per cent over the year before, according to Nielsen Online.