Dominic Holden has a pretty amazing piece about the fact that The Seattle Times is charging its employees to use the Seattle Times online archive.
As a reporter, I frequently have to search our website’s online archives for linking, providing context, or developing backfill on articles. It didn’t seem possible that a newspaper would actually charge its reporters for an essential function of their jobs. That would be like installing payphones on everyone’s desk and pocketing the money.
At first, when I read that last sentence, I thought don’t give them any ideas. Giving Frank Blethen ways to screw his employees over is like giving Frank Blethen a gun and a puppy: nothing good can come out of it, yet Frank Blethen will be full of smiles. But then I thought fuck it, and came up with a list of other ways he can screw his employees:
- Charge reporters for pens and notepads
- Force delivery drivers to pay for routine maintenance on their trucks, or at least to paint them over
- Reclassify all employees as interns, and don’t pay them
- Instead of paying writers per word, charge them per word for proofing and editing
- Force freelancers to buy ad space
- Force columnists to sell ad space
- Give ad space away free to candidates and causes, thus devaluing the pretense of neutrality that the paper strives for
- Make nepotism hires for important jobs
Wow. As someone who’s worked at newspapers as a reporter and columnist, that is really fucked up.
About the only rationale I can come up with is that the Times considers providing context or back story (or getting facts right) outside a reporter’s job description.
Hey, it’s the future of Capitalism. He’ll be installing coin operated toilets in the bathrooms next, that only take Susan B. Anthony dollars. As a machinist, I had to buy a lot of tools. Many costing well into the hundreds of dollars, why not reporters, cops, firemen and those pothole-filler dudes too? Come to think of it, those assholes need to buy their own asphalt too, no sense in allowing them to leech off the public dole for the shit. Thats communism!
The parade of Reich-wing wage slavery and wage theft continues….
*POW* LOVE it!
Hell, why not just mainline money by applying to the Koch brothers for a grant? Or, better yet, ask them for a buyout? They’re in a buying mode. The Koches want to own America’s big-city papers so they can control what we read and, ultimately, what we believe.
Sounds more than anything else like the Times hired somebody to set up their web site for the “paywall” and they did a lousy job.
@5 Yeah, but conspiracy theories are more fun. Ask any troll.