[SilasX]

Jeez! I never knew submarining had gotten that bad! I always assumed it was “PR firm gives you a bunch of quotes and research, possibly a narrative, and you write it from there.” I never thought it was as transparent as “here’s some money to say you wrote it”.

[amsilprotag]

I was pretty sure "say you wrote it" was an example in the original essay. Though upon review, Graham writes "almost verbatim".

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[SilasX]

It was the "paying you cash to say you wrote it" that was shocking. Graham's model in the submarine piece was that the PR agencies only "pay" you in the sense of doing your work for you, which is a kind of compensation, but not as distasteful as directly buying the writer's authorship with cash.