[chipperyman573]

I lived with a journalist for a while. Basically it can be summed up as "now they pay freelancers to write for basically nothing except ~exposure~". Typically there's a word count and a monthly article minimum, and if you don't hit your monthly minimum you get nothing for any of the articles you wrote that month. Like just $0 for all your work. This isn't just blogs like TC BTW, my roomate worked for Forbes and I think Bloomberg, but the second one might have been a real job, idk. Forbes was definatly freelance, though. And this was business news, not some BS side column. If you are following the industry he wrote about closely, there's a good chance you have read at least one of his articles

Fwiw the writers (at least, the one I knew) hate it too because it floods the job market with ultra low paid competition, and since it's "just the way things are", a lot of those underpaid people are very talented and are glad to accept very little pay

[ghaff]

Forbes is one of the saddest cases. Under Malcolm Forbes the biweekly print magazine was arguably the real class of the business periodicals. But, at some point, the online version just sold its soul for page views with all the "influencer" blogs, many of them written by people with conflicts of interest a mile long. Overall, their "native advertising" was/is as egregious as anyone's.

And that's not even getting into just how annoying it is to try to read anything on Forbes because of all the pop-ups etc.