Remember that great memo from Time editor Rick Stengel this summer that demanded writers get with the web? “(E)valuations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com.â€
Turns out, a strongly worded memo only goes so far. The latest version of a proposed contract between The Newspaper Guild and Time Inc. would not require any online writing – and wouldn’t penalize writers who turn down online writing. The contract covers TIME, People, Fortune, Fortune Small Business, Sports Illustrated and Money.
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I get that the union is trying to protect their workers, and in a way I kind of respect that. It’s at least an honorable idea.
But who wouldn’t want their work to appear on the web? It’s a bigger audience than print. It lasts longer than print. It’s searchable, linkable, discussable that way. If you want to be “protected” from the web, go live on the prairie and write poetry or whatever.
Protecting Time, Inc. writers from working on the web strikes me as the classic union blunder — protecting workers from the future and thereby dooming the employer and all those “protected” jobs in the end.
I wish they’d just start paying freelancers for online work. Make resale harder. I’ve been out of it for a while. Anyone do this?