My Spam folder on my Yahoo e-mail account
All of the spam in my spam folder has become a lot more obvious since Thanksgiving.
Then there are the notifications from the Huffington Post, even since I unsubscribed from the notifications oh-I-don’t-remember-how-many-months-ago.
…freelance labor journalist Mike Elk, 24, got press credentials to last week’s Mortgage Bankers Association conference through his affiliation with Huffington Post, then passed those credentials off to a union organizer. The unpaid blogger, who was promptly fired, contends “there is a tradition in labor journalism to be active participant journalists.
Seema says:
Well, you wouldn’t want it getting around that people should be paid for their work, or anything.
An Open Letter to Ariana Huffington.
Pay your fucking writers. People don’t write for “the exposure”, or “the ability to say ‘I wrote for Huffington Post!’”. Where is all the ad revenue going if it’s not going to the people THAT WRITE WHATS ON THE PAGE? Back to you? After server costs and whatever overhead there is, you should start paying your fucking writers.
It’s mindblowing - MINDBLOWING - that the superfuckingliberal Ariana Huffington thinks that all the writers will write ‘just for the exposure’. I don’t care that it looks good on a resume to say ‘Gee whiz you know that one lady who’s on Bill Maher every month or two who has great hair and sounds like she has a mouthful of marbles? I wrote for her’ but in not paying your own fucking writers you’re setting up others to follow in your footsteps. You already do. Half the writing jobs on Craigslist say the same thing - ‘writing for exposure’. It’s a daft fucking move on your part booking yourself as superfuckingliberal and progressive and then using some seriously antiquated Dark Overlord fuck-the-underlings let-them-eat-cake tactics.
What’s worse is that people WILL follow in your footsteps. You’re like the Oprah for people that listen to NPR. Don’t be an idiot and start paying the people that work for you.
Well said.
The problem is, sites like The Huffington Post only exist because people are willing to write for free.
That’s another reason why I blog on Tumblr:
If anyone will make money off of my writing (sic), it will be me when I figure out how to stick Google Ad widgets in the borders of my pages.
If people stopped giving them free content, their business model built on the backs of unpaid labor would fall under it’s own weight.
The only way I could possibly ask someone to work for me for free is if I wasn’t taking a check myself, or if I was giving them equity in my venture. Huffington Post and sites like it are living off that free labor, making money off it and cutting themselves a check.
