[Pic of me and Summer at the World Cafe, way back when]
Happy hour at World Cafe with Kristen turns into a yummy, seafood linguini birthday dinner (for her — she’s turning 30 on Monday) — but now it’s only 10 pm and I’m wasted and tired and home.
At least I biked there and back, which burned off like 1 of the 5 glasses of wine — a combo of merlot (3 glasses), cabernet (1 glass) and chianti (1 glass).
Luckily I have some leftover cab at home. Yay!
Today as a whole’s been emotionally stressful. Yesterday my friend Kyeann — with whom I took part in a panel ’bout green blogging, AND with whom I bought twin Patagonia dresses — told me she was fired from Treehugger. V. shocking, cuz in the green blogging panel, she represented Treehugger and has basically been with that blog for as long as I’ve known her, develping contacts for the blog, promoting it, etc.
So we talk. Kyeann says she feels she’s been fired because she’d asked for an open forum about fair compensation for writers at Treehugger. Time for investigative work for me.
So I talk to my friend Summer, who sorta writes for Treehugger now; she says she was shocked by the abruptness with which Kyeann was fired, but she doesn’t know any deets. More than that, Summer’s v. new to Treehugger and more concerned ’bout other personal issues she’s raised and not heard back ’bout. The writer compensation talk’s on her back burner.
So I email my bloggy friend Jasmin, who now also writes for Treehugger, who says the forum Treehugger provided to talk ’bout the compensation issue — basically, a few different conference calls with 10 or so writers on each — seemed open and constructive to her. Jasmin says she heard Kyeann was fired for other issues — which is what Michael, editor at Treehugger, and Graham, honcho at Treehugger say. None can give details, due to employer-employee confidentiality issues.
I have a long chat with a rather freaked-out Graham, who says he’s absolutely open to open forums, that there’s no “evil divide and conquor strategy” to subdue writers, and that based on the conference calls, Treehugger plans to pay higher than average compensation to its writers.
All of these chats’re happening because what’s happening affects a buncha my friends, and because I contribute to Treehugger, though I’ve declined to sign on as an official writer. Basically, I’m calling people up cuz I wanna figure out what I want to do, and want to write ’bout the experience of figuring this out for myself. This, I find out, seriously freaks out the Treehugger people even when all I’m trying to do’s ask Qs to find out more. Perhaps that’s normal — I dunno.
Which is to say I like being rogue, and at this point, I’m damn glad I don’t have a blog boss. I have serious authority figure issues.
One of these days I’ll search in my gmail archives for the tortured no’s I sent Treehugger the few times they asked me to come on as an official writer. Sometimes I can laugh at myself for my weird reasons for declining to make money from my writing. Most of the time, I know my freedom to write what I want when I want’s worth more than chump change.
Also, do ALL of my green writerly peeps have to sign up to write for Treehugger? I mean, it’s fine, and it’s their choice, but I’d just like to feel like not everyone I know’s sold on same blog, for what I honestly feel is chump change, if for no other reason than that I’d like us to have other shit to talk about at happy hour –
Looking forward to seeing what comes of this, interesting stuff Siel..
Comment by david — April 27, 2007 @ 11:24 pm
i didn’t realize bloggers get paid to write. come to think of it though, i guess since top 100 blogs make thousands of dollars in ad revenues it would only be fair to pay for the writers work and time.
chump change you say? how much is that?
Comment by mary-beth — April 28, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
Cute investigative adventure!
I had a contract that meant either TH or myself needed to give one another 30 days notice to sever the relationship. Here’s what happened on 4/24 and 4/25 (Mountain Time, cuz that’s where I am):
5:48 PM: I write an email to the team that criticizes the small group conference calls as not enabling us to all hear one another and points out that constantly hiring new writers is cheaper than paying long-term writers for all the work they do.
6:05 PM: I receive and email from COO Ken Rother titled “Enough” that tells me I can be in any conference call I want, and if I have questions to contact him or Graham. At 6:19 I let him know that I think an open, on-line forum would work better, that a lot of people were unhappy about the initial plan to run the proposed contracts buy just a few people before giving them to everyone to sign, and that a group of us were “putting together what we think would be a fair plan.”
10:31 PM: With public and private encouragement from a number of writers, I suggest May 11 as a goal for our coming to some collective agreement through online discussion.
11:00 PM: I find out later that this is the time Ken disabled my email address.
I log on the next afternoon to very little email and realize what has happened. Eventually Ken calls and says “TreeHugger no longer wishes to have a business relationship” with me. I am given no reason — something like “which must be no surprise.” Which it wasn’t, what with the lack of email. No 30 days notice. Not any notice.
If I was let go for other reasons, neither Ken nor Graham has told me what they were. Through Mike, a couple of stories have been circulated, one of which is an issue with my writing for another site. That doesn’t constitute breach of contract. I think the timing says it all! Do you know may COOs who shut off someone’s email in the wee hours of the morning (1AM his time)?
It’s kind of nice, though, because now that it may appear that the company’s ethos doesn’t match its content, they really do have to create an open process (not like the tightly controlled conference calls I’ve heard about), compensate the writers fairly, and give decent equity in the multi-million dollar business that the writers have helped build for very little. I truly hope TreeHugger steps up and makes it happen!
Comment by Kyeann — April 29, 2007 @ 12:15 am
Glad to see TH is just another giant corporate entity, pretending to be a small, fun, company. What’s next, they open a smokestack out back and tell everyone it’s not really there?
It’s sad when a great site goes corporate and loses any and all credibility.
Comment by Jim — April 29, 2007 @ 9:37 am
I heard that writers get paid $10 per post. But this was a long time ago, so I don’t know if that has changed.
Comment by matt — April 29, 2007 @ 10:40 am
It’s $10 per post, and I think $15 for a longer post. If your post gets the most hits or whatever, you get bonuses (a few hundred a week or something like that). But Graham made it v. clear that the payments are gonna go up now, post conference calls.
But what I’m saying is not that the $10 is too little to pay writers. I don’t know how much TH makes as a company, and so have no criteria to judge how much is enough. I also have lots of friends who blog for free (and all the posts I’ve done for TH I did for free) without feeling like they’re being exploited. I don’t feel TH has exploited me personally, though it’s never paid me. That was my choice.
What I’m saying is that the tradeoff of going in as a paid writer — buying into a system that to me, seems to reward popularity over quality and substance of writing — doesn’t sound like fun for me. In this sense, I guess even $20 or $30 a post might feel like chump change for me if I felt I was under obligation to write them — meaning my chump change comment here has more to do with my own weird relationship to money than with the actual amount TH pays. I mean, I definitely have had friends tell me, if you can write a post, or if you can write a post and get $10, why not take $10? In some ways, I see their point. But I’m me.
Comment by Siel — April 29, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
Of all the adjectives one could use to describe Graham, “generous” is definitely not one of them. He’s paranoid and fairly manipulative. That’s not to say he’s a “bad” person – he’s an extremely shrewd businessperson and making money and fame is far more important to him than other issues – as long as you see it that way, you won’t get screwed. But naively approaching the guy will get you burned. Anyone who refers to himself as a “do-gooder” (I’m not making that up – look at his bio on the site) has a lot more going on….
Comment by Terry Sykes — November 5, 2007 @ 11:17 am