The Scarlet Letter

Many have commented on the crass, arrogant and patronising attitude of the HuffPo’s UK editor to those who provide much of his content (and thus pay his wages):

“…I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers…we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.
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When is an author

Publishing is changing.
Danuta Kean recently wrote a piece on the trend towards not paying writers which included this sentence:

Thanks to the rapid growth in blogging and self-publishing – neither of which provide much reward for practitioners (81% of bloggers earn less than $100 a year, while half of US self-published writers earn less than $500 from their books) – the professional status of writers has been eroded, lending credence to the idea that practitioners do it for love not money and that freelancers bring easily replicated skills (they do not, see Danuta’s Guides).

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