Sunday, October 27, 2013

Content, Money, and Who's to Blame

My weekly Tungsten Hippo post is about how creating content is the hard part of setting up a website- and always was!- and a few thoughts on why it matters whether or not we pay writers.

It was not inspired by the NYT piece that is making the rounds today. I do not work that fast! (And as an aside- can we stop with comparing things to slavery? Being expected to write for free is indeed annoying, even insulting. But it is not even close to slavery.) I did publish it a little earlier than usual because I wanted to include it in my tweeting in response to the Twitter activity that article inspired.

However, in a major self-promotion fail, I then tweeted from the wrong account, and my Tungsten Hippo project garnered none of the extra attention created when one of my tweets got RT'ed by several people with large networks.
I also should have put a link to my post in THAT tweet and not a separate one. I clearly need to work on my marketing skills. (And I am! I may write a future post about the various things I'm using Tungsten Hippo to learn about.)

Anyway, the post was actually inspired by one of the secondary reactions I had to the odious treatment Danielle Lee got when she politely declined the chance to write for free. We rightly focused on the racism and sexism in that story, but I was also struck by yet another example of people setting up a website and thinking that since they've done the hard tech work, people should be thrilled to provide them with the content for free. I wrote my post to express my opinions on that. You should go over to Tungsten Hippo to read them- it is not a long post. But I will say here: I think they have it exactly backwards, and I think we're all culpable in the results.

1 comment:

  1. Oh yes, many requests to write (or speak) for free. I guess people sometimes do it, so people figure why not ask?

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