"The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done."
This is a notoriously ambiguous definition but with AOL's rigorous guidelines, deadlines, and instructions it sure seems like this isn't an "independent" work force.
The other issue is, as a contractor, the contractor retains all copyrights to the material created. Work for hire does not apply in this instance.
He could send a DMCA takedown notice and have all of his articles removed, or organize all the other unemployed writers and coordinate a massive DMCA takedown letter writing campaign.
There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business.
One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke, and told me:
"You kid come into this business thinking you're going to make a difference. Pretty soon you find out, you're just filling the space around the ads."
He was right, actually. So I got into high tech instead, and have been doing startups ever since. Not sure I always make a difference, but at least I'm trying, instead of just filling space...
I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.
I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.
They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.
Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.
I have to say I read this article and thought: isn't this what journos are paid to do?
I majored in journalism and did work as a newspaper writer and photographer as a while, but didn't enjoy it. Eventually I found my way into computer programming.
The pay WAS terrible, but the job was nothing like what this AOL writer talks about. I was expected to research my stories and write them well, and was given time to do so. I would have quit if I'd been asked to crank out crap like this writer describes, and I'm sure any of my peers at the paper or in college would have done likewise. We had a lot of pride in doing good work.
I'm not sure how the financial model for journalism is going to shake out, but the world does need people who spend all their time finding out and explaining what's going on around us. It does not, however, need cookie-cutter, mindless sitcom reviews. I hope this kind of "content creation" dies a swift death.
I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.
I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.
They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.
Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.
Creating content online is NOT a viable business model. Recent history is littered with new content creators, and they've failed. The viable business model is either to host other content - YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, GrooveShark, Earbits, etc - Or to create content that is agnostic as to their use - Hollywood Studios, NY Publishers, Music Labels. - So either AOL should transition to a creator, or transition to a online host. It can't expect to have a viable future by creating content for online only. This is true of AOL and any other business model that tries this. JustinTV - Hosts, ESPN - Hosts, The WKUK - Creators, Monty Python - Creators. So please, once and for all, let's stop imagining these Online Studios, or these Online Magazine, or even worse, these Ipad Magazines. Instead think Vice. They've got music, magazines, tv, movies, and they don't care where you see it. http://www.vbs.tv/ - http://www.viceland.com/ . Just a bunch of Canadians that thought that they could rewrite the magazine business model by giving away their magazines for free. And look where that's taken them. So to recap. Make your choice, either host or create, and abide by their distinct rules.
I worked for a content site that ultimately failed. We tried to do high quality content. Even paying writers a decent wage. Ultimately it devolved into what you read here, chasing PVs with provocative and borderline false headlines. Quality takes a back seat as soon as you realize you're bleeding money. It was really sad to see and became a soul-crushing environment. Very very tough business.
Anyone have a better example, or of the elusive single online content creator? (Like AOL tired / is trying to be). We have penny arcade as the leading example. http://www.penny-arcade.com/ and since I had never heard of them before this, I am skeptical, but I'm checking them out.
Maybe this is an idealistic thought, but I think this trend of writing SEO laden garbage is what will finally make quality journalism behind paywalls work. People will eventually be driven to pay for decent content, unable to put up with irrelevant half baked articles churned out at breakneck pace.
I pay for publications like The Economist and The Atlantic (both of which I read entirely digitally) for exactly that reason. I want quality content when I sit down to spend my precious reading time on something.
I can hardly imagine spending that time reading insipid, content mill junk. Who puts so low of a value on their time?
That's an interesting take on this. I would certainly be happy to pay to avoid having to wade through all the garbage that's on the internet now. Now, that doesn't just apply to journalism, it's all content really.
To take this a step further, for me, the only reason I'm ever exposed to garbage content is from google results. I'm not sure google will be able to solve this problem, or if they do, it won't be from taking the same approach that's made them successful. I expect that some sort of curated search engine(s) will be the solution in the future. What exactly this will look like, I have no idea... if I did know I would be trying to build it.
“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good or bad?” I said.
“Not really,” was the reply.
If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without the stress.
Obviously a straight-up Markov Chain generator isn't going to work, but a smarter system that would allow you to basically sketch the article and then have the system automatically babble in English to fill out the word count while not actually needing any additional information strikes me as feasible, though not trivial.
The OP talks about how in the age where there are more readers than ever, writers are undervalued. What the OP fails to mention is the quality of readers and writers. A reader who consumes 100,000 pages worth of Facebook statuses is not really much of a reader. Historically, reading was used as a means to communicate ideas. Think Machiavelli, Aristotle, Nietzsche. Now it is used for communicating a much larger scope of information: "Lady Gaga Pantless in Paris". You cannot compare a writer that writes the Illiad and a writer that writes TV Show reviews of shows they've never seen. They are not the same category.
Anyone else notice how good of a writer this guy actually is? Throughout the article he takes you through an emotional journey that very effectively portrays AOL as a soulless monster. (The third-to-last paragraph is a very good example of this.)
His words may or may not have merit, but his writing style is extremely persuasive. He got his message across and certainly made an impact. If only AOL took advantage of this, we might be reading an entirely different article.
Just an aside: would have been awesome if the writer created an article generating program. He could feed the program a few key words (perhaps just the name of the TV show). The program could scrape or be manually fed some information from Google trends. Then add some scraping of data from existing articles. Use a markov chain to keep the content fresh and you're good to go! I'm just thinking of the sentence generation via markov chain from Programming Pearls and the hilarious auto-generated computer science papers that were submitted and accepted by some journal.
It would be hilarious but I'm not so sure it would work that well. I think one of the big reasons the scigen papers passed for real was because a lot of people will assume that if they can't understand a paper, it's just gone over their heads. There's enough real jargon in them to reinforce that assumption. Entertainment news is a lot more accessible so it would be pretty obvious.
This just makes me think: why in the world would any one want to become a writer these days? There isn't much money in it, unless you get lucky and hit it big. I understanding having a passion, but this is one passion that should be relegated to hobby time. Am I wrong on this? I'm just not seeing the economic viability of writing sentences and having people (whether readers or advertisers) paying you proportionate to the amount of work you put in.
Being a writer has never been a way to get rich. All those movies about newspaper journalists are not filled with a bunch of wealthy writers. They are grinding it out, for the most part, and they always have.
The economics are true of just about anything that scales -- startups and anything in the arts both come to mind. There's no guaranteed route to six-figure comfort (like there is with, say, dental school), but the potential rewards are enormous.
And, as other responses have pointed out, in all of these fields, people really, really want to do them. The number of writing jobs that are 'comfortable' (pick your number, $60k?) has sharply declined from the glory days of the newspaper industry, but it still has the same non-monetary attractions, and there are the still the same opportunities to become, say, a bestselling nonfiction author.
Are things really at a state where 35k is considered an impressive salary for a journalist in the US? I know programmers are spoiled, but I was kind of shocked at the implication that that was thought of as big bucks. Sad.
I am a huge supporter of creatives and artists. That being said, I have only partial sympathy for this guy. Work is work and we all need it, particularly creatives, but when you take a job writing about things you don't know anything about, you can't complain that you're being asked to do so. If he hadn't seen the most popular shows on television, he took a job he wasn't qualified for. That's fine, but then, he couldn't be bothered to research the industry he was covering - when that research required sitting in front of a TV and watching The Simpsons. That's not exactly slave labor.
It's a shame that content production has become the ad mill that it has, and writing about that from an objective viewpoint with all of this guy's internal data would have been good journalism. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who got paid $35k a year to write about cartoons and couldn't be bothered to watch some of them in his spare time.
I inferred that he was being asked to write about 16 (one article every half hour for eight hours) specific show episodes for a deadline about 12 hours after they aired; even with a Tivo, how would you both watch and write?
I take a slightly less pessimistic view. Its an economic process that is in the process of balancing itself.
There are a lot of people who only want "free" information (which is to say free news, free reviews, free self help advice, etc) and of course providing information is not 'free' as it costs real dollars to host it, to maintain it, to fix it up after the web site gets hacked etc.
To enable it to stay 'free' people put advertisements on the page which the advertiser pays the costs of hosting the content.
That creates an incentive to monetize the difference between the cost of the content and the revenue from the ads. Given the incentive all sorts of suppliers have arisen, from domain squatters at the low end, to businesses like Demand Media and AOL apparently.
If you look at content creation you will see that this is creating 'content' at an unsustainable rate. At some point, a small population at first, and then growing larger, of people will say "I'll pay you for information that is 'better' rather than pay the cost of wading through the free crap to get to the good stuff."
When that switch reaches a large enough number of readers, I believe it will 'spontaneously' create the actual market for purely digital information sources. The blend of subscriber revenue and modest ad revenue will create a better reader experience and quality companies will emerge to take advantage of that.
FYI If you havent taken the time to read the comments posted to the actual article I strongly recommend you do. They're priceless - perhaps better than article itself.
Okay, but the future has a plan. The plan doesn't involve AOL. This and the fact they refuse to cancel your account. What a pathetic company. Good job stockholders are dumb.
Every bonus taking banker raped the banks' stockholders. But nobody seems to care. Stockholders come bottom, behind customers, employees, and bigger creditors. It's not quite how capitalism was supposed to work.
[+] [-] aresant|15 years ago|reply
AOL is treading a fine, fine line there.
The IRS defines an independent contractor as:
"The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done."
This is a notoriously ambiguous definition but with AOL's rigorous guidelines, deadlines, and instructions it sure seems like this isn't an "independent" work force.
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179115,00....
[+] [-] chopsueyar|15 years ago|reply
See this comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2666507
The other issue is, as a contractor, the contractor retains all copyrights to the material created. Work for hire does not apply in this instance.
He could send a DMCA takedown notice and have all of his articles removed, or organize all the other unemployed writers and coordinate a massive DMCA takedown letter writing campaign.
[+] [-] SemanticFog|15 years ago|reply
One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke, and told me:
"You kid come into this business thinking you're going to make a difference. Pretty soon you find out, you're just filling the space around the ads."
He was right, actually. So I got into high tech instead, and have been doing startups ever since. Not sure I always make a difference, but at least I'm trying, instead of just filling space...
[+] [-] zwischenzug|15 years ago|reply
I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.
I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.
They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.
Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.
I have to say I read this article and thought: isn't this what journos are paid to do?
[+] [-] billybob|14 years ago|reply
The pay WAS terrible, but the job was nothing like what this AOL writer talks about. I was expected to research my stories and write them well, and was given time to do so. I would have quit if I'd been asked to crank out crap like this writer describes, and I'm sure any of my peers at the paper or in college would have done likewise. We had a lot of pride in doing good work.
I'm not sure how the financial model for journalism is going to shake out, but the world does need people who spend all their time finding out and explaining what's going on around us. It does not, however, need cookie-cutter, mindless sitcom reviews. I hope this kind of "content creation" dies a swift death.
[+] [-] technomancy|15 years ago|reply
Except perhaps the scale.
[+] [-] zwischenzug|15 years ago|reply
I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.
I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.
They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.
Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.
[+] [-] antihero|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckFrank|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] localhost3000|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckFrank|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney
Anyone have a better example, or of the elusive single online content creator? (Like AOL tired / is trying to be). We have penny arcade as the leading example. http://www.penny-arcade.com/ and since I had never heard of them before this, I am skeptical, but I'm checking them out.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|15 years ago|reply
And where can you see Vice TV other than online?
[+] [-] kylelibra|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Legion|15 years ago|reply
I can hardly imagine spending that time reading insipid, content mill junk. Who puts so low of a value on their time?
[+] [-] kirkland|15 years ago|reply
To take this a step further, for me, the only reason I'm ever exposed to garbage content is from google results. I'm not sure google will be able to solve this problem, or if they do, it won't be from taking the same approach that's made them successful. I expect that some sort of curated search engine(s) will be the solution in the future. What exactly this will look like, I have no idea... if I did know I would be trying to build it.
[+] [-] mattmanser|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpapathanasiou|15 years ago|reply
“Not really,” was the reply.
If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without the stress.
[+] [-] jerf|15 years ago|reply
Somebody's doing something similar for sports reporting: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/18/robot-journalist-writ... You'd have to tweak it for a different domain but I'm sure that would be feasible for your average gossip-rag type story.
[+] [-] spaghetti|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beambot|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
[+] [-] IgorPartola|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yangez|15 years ago|reply
His words may or may not have merit, but his writing style is extremely persuasive. He got his message across and certainly made an impact. If only AOL took advantage of this, we might be reading an entirely different article.
[+] [-] kylelibra|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarchowdhury|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaghetti|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitcheme|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsackmann|15 years ago|reply
And, as other responses have pointed out, in all of these fields, people really, really want to do them. The number of writing jobs that are 'comfortable' (pick your number, $60k?) has sharply declined from the glory days of the newspaper industry, but it still has the same non-monetary attractions, and there are the still the same opportunities to become, say, a bestselling nonfiction author.
[+] [-] stevenj|15 years ago|reply
But as Bezos once said: "You don't choose your passions. Your passions choose you."
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikomi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallywax|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earbitscom|15 years ago|reply
It's a shame that content production has become the ad mill that it has, and writing about that from an objective viewpoint with all of this guy's internal data would have been good journalism. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who got paid $35k a year to write about cartoons and couldn't be bothered to watch some of them in his spare time.
[+] [-] thyrsus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyrhett|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mihar|15 years ago|reply
I've been a subscriber to paid magazines/papers and I'll continue to be one to digital ones.
But I guess my kind is rare and of course the majority always wins.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
There are a lot of people who only want "free" information (which is to say free news, free reviews, free self help advice, etc) and of course providing information is not 'free' as it costs real dollars to host it, to maintain it, to fix it up after the web site gets hacked etc.
To enable it to stay 'free' people put advertisements on the page which the advertiser pays the costs of hosting the content.
That creates an incentive to monetize the difference between the cost of the content and the revenue from the ads. Given the incentive all sorts of suppliers have arisen, from domain squatters at the low end, to businesses like Demand Media and AOL apparently.
If you look at content creation you will see that this is creating 'content' at an unsustainable rate. At some point, a small population at first, and then growing larger, of people will say "I'll pay you for information that is 'better' rather than pay the cost of wading through the free crap to get to the good stuff."
When that switch reaches a large enough number of readers, I believe it will 'spontaneously' create the actual market for purely digital information sources. The blend of subscriber revenue and modest ad revenue will create a better reader experience and quality companies will emerge to take advantage of that.
[+] [-] dengzhi|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lefstathiou|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btipling|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj700|15 years ago|reply
Okay, but the future has a plan. The plan doesn't involve AOL. This and the fact they refuse to cancel your account. What a pathetic company. Good job stockholders are dumb.
Every bonus taking banker raped the banks' stockholders. But nobody seems to care. Stockholders come bottom, behind customers, employees, and bigger creditors. It's not quite how capitalism was supposed to work.
[+] [-] mckoss|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lfnik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|15 years ago|reply