Study Hall Digest 6/26/2017

Hi

Surprisingly, a great way for a company to make money is to not pay any of the people doing work for them! The WSJ takes a look at Spoon University and other for-profit companies that create localized college-centric content using the unpaid labor of thousands of college students. The companies have attracted hundreds of millions in investment. Basically these kids are working the content mines for free. I don’t think anyone should write anything for free, but this is even less defensible than literary publications promising experience and exposure, because what these kids are getting experience doing is creating garbage content: Tasty®-style recipes, quasi-feminist listicles, “5 Signs He Loves You (Even if He’s Not Saying It),” (side note: dump his ass if he’s not saying it!!). So basically this is your New Media career trajectory: unpaid content miner -> unpaid intern -> BuzzFeed listicle writer -> ???. Seems terrible.

BuzzFeed has an (overly?) long article about The Guardian US, in which the writer posits The Guardian could have been really cool, but instead turned into an also-ran by mimicking its competitors instead of setting itself apart with investigative scoops and hard-hitting features (remember, Guardian US was the outlet that broke the Snowden story!). Also one of its top editors was apparently an asshole and sexual harasser (men: bad). Feels like what happened at Al Jazeera America too: squandering millions of dollars to recreate media strategies that have already proven failures.

Unrelatedly….I’m hearing that Medium is staffing back up for a publication that sounds like it will be a lot like Matter.

Grist, like most environmentally-focused organizations, writing, etc., is excessively white. :[

Final Thoughts

Edits as a way of not paying you: I often get assigned things like “$500 for 1,200 words” and so I write 1,200 words. When I get edits back, there are so many questions and requests for additional info that the total gets pushed up to like 2,000+ words. Does this happen to you? What do you do? This is why I’m a fan of per-word rates—it incentivises tight editing and good labor standards.