How SB Nation Profits Off An Army Of Exploited Workers
August 15, 2017 12:26 PM   Subscribe

 
Journalism practically paved the way for the so-called gig economy with magazines relying on tenuous freelancer contracts, rampant use of unpaid internships (including at Gawker Media)
Nice to see that Gawker Media hasn't dropped its venerable tradition of attacking its competitors for things that it does itself.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:45 PM on August 15, 2017 [21 favorites]


I'll comment on this for $20 (SAIT).
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:46 PM on August 15, 2017 [6 favorites]


Exactly. Kind of ironic to read this bit of outragefilter here. Is the author unfamiliar with the Internet?

I'm a paid writer for SB Nation's "Niners Nation." But I spend a lot more time writing, unpaid, for Metafilter. And I'm perfectly happy with both arrangements.
posted by msalt at 12:50 PM on August 15, 2017 [6 favorites]


> Nice to see that Gawker Media hasn't dropped its venerable tradition of attacking its competitors for things that it does itself.

Which is kind of a miracle because Gawker Media was killed and dismembered last year due to lawsuits.
posted by ardgedee at 12:51 PM on August 15, 2017 [9 favorites]


This does seem to amount to a story that I feel like I've heard about any popular media property - Gawker, The Awl family, even the Hairpin - at some point.

Reading the article, one factor for SBNation in particular has to be the sheer amount of people needed to actually have coverage - take this, for instance:
The site manager who makes less than $600 per month said she hopes to use the job as a springboard to a full-time job. She says she writes between two and three posts a week and tries to bring in more writers as well. At one point, she said, her site had dozens of writers, photographers and copy editors.
From earlier in the article, it sounds like the site managers are the ones expected to do the hiring. The fact that she was expecting to keep that entire enterprise of dozens going on that amount of money seems wild to me - Polygon as a whole has a masthead of 25 or so people, and it has to have a way larger market than a single sports team.

On preview: Of course Gawker died, but it is kind of weird seeing that line on Deadspin.
posted by sagc at 12:56 PM on August 15, 2017


Nice to see that Gawker Media hasn't dropped its venerable tradition of attacking its competitors for things that it does itself.

Exactly. Kind of ironic to read this bit of outragefilter here. Is the author unfamiliar with the Internet?

Oh, well, in that case, if someone else ever did it, or the outlet publishing the critique doesn't have an absolutely flawless moral history, it's totally fine to build an entire business model on exploiting people.
posted by protocoach at 1:08 PM on August 15, 2017 [17 favorites]


> I'm a paid writer for SB Nation's "Niners Nation." But I spend a lot more time writing, unpaid, for Metafilter. And I'm perfectly happy with both arrangements.

The problem I see reading the story is the gap between expectations (based on what SBNation tells their site operators and writers) and the actual pay. You seem to not have any expectation beyond the check you get for your content, but clearly SBNation is selling the idea that you can start out at the bottom and work your way into a higher-pay position, perhaps even as a full paid employee of SBNation. It's possible that this is "caveat emptor", but the piece cites some pretty solid evidence that SBNation is blowing smoke about how easy it is to go from "labor of love" to "contract labor that gets a few shekels" to "actual jobby job."

I of course do not expect Deadspin to pursue such a story in a way that gives a competitor any benefit of the doubt, but SBNation's responses, including the changing of the FAQ on how people are paid) reflect at least a guilty conscience, if not some signs of awareness of their role in exploiting peoples' labor.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:11 PM on August 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


Which is kind of a miracle because Gawker Media was killed and dismembered last year due to lawsuits.

Yeah but Deadspin rest of Gawker is now owned by the billion dollar Univision corporation so this is kind of punching down at a much smaller competitor.
posted by octothorpe at 1:14 PM on August 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't think it's really about moral purity on the part of Deadspin, though - Personally, it seems strange to use 8 000 words to explain, as far as I can tell, that Vox doesn't pay very well, and doesn't have much managerial/editorial oversight of people that are convinced to write for them by their payed site managers.

Which is all perfectly scummy, but it's such a common type of scumminess that I'd be more interested in a bit more complex/zoomed-out of a perspective.
posted by sagc at 1:14 PM on August 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


I never thought journalism was in the same category as modeling or the film industry - being so appealing that young people are willing to be exploited just to get a foot in the door, but here we are.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:25 PM on August 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


SBNation is blowing smoke about how easy it is to go from "labor of love" to "contract labor that gets a few shekels"

It's interesting too how one of the key words in all their smoke-blowing continues to be "community," when they've shifted their sites' emphasis and even design so strongly toward trying to seem publication-like. The SBN sites I know, at least, have drawn an ever stronger distinction in recent years between a small staff of above-the-fold article/post authors (who act like beat writers, trying to cover all the daily team news) and the stuff contributed by a larger and less tightly managed group of commenters, whose "FanPosts" are harder and harder to find and who are often subject to pretty stringent moderation if they leave comments disagreeing or taking issue with the staffers' articles. What you see on an SBN site now seems not much like the older vision of "fan communities" that they used to at least pay lip service to, where the idea was more that of whatever was the best writing from "the community" would be what the site focused on, and seems a lot more like a journalistic organization where you'd expect the "articles" to be generated by paid at least semi-professionals. But somehow the "community" rhetoric is still thereā€¦ when they need it.
posted by RogerB at 1:29 PM on August 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think that's been the story for a long time - the progression that tonycpsu lays out has been called out for as long as I remember - and, of course, what Vox's "everyone gets paid" policy was supposed to combat.
posted by sagc at 1:30 PM on August 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've commented quite some time on WCG (SB Nation's Chicago Bears blog), and once considered applying to do the daily roundups since I'm like 6 hours ahead, I could compile the news in the morning, and have it ready by 8am local), decided against it because I'd be working for free with absolutely no chance of actually being hired by the local sports media because unless it's NBA, they're not interested, and when they venture outside, good lord, a monkey in a typewriter would do a better job.
Eventually also left the site because I felt the blog was turning into plain user-baiting to rehash the same Cutler discussions to increase page hits. A usual post would have around 20-50 comments or so, I knew when a non-gameday/big news post had over 100 posts, it had been visited by a user who at a point mostly contributed by something comparable to entering a room covered in shit moshing everyone screaming CUTLER SUUUUUUUKS!!!!11!!one. Yeah, I understand the need to drive ad impressions, but doing it at the expense of the quality of the site was going to harm it on the long run.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:33 PM on August 15, 2017


It's not useful to have this discussion without mentioning the broader changes in the media landscape. Traditionally (pre-Internet), a major city might like Detroit or San Francisco might have had a dozen paid writers and broadcasters total covering a team like the Pistons, and most of those would also be required to cover different teams outside of that sports' season. Plus a few sportsTalk radio people, also year round multisports.

Today, the same number of employees work for traditional media (but probably get paid less, as newspapers are collapsing outside of a couple of emerging national website/papers (NYT, WSJ). There is more of a cable news presence, at Comcast (your city/region)Sports channels. Talk radio is about the same.

On top of that, you have the new layer of websites, with SB Nation dominating the market, but many others around. They are focused on the one team year round, and hire many more people who spend fewers hours and make less money than traditional reporters. It absolutely is a path to career advancement.

Jennifer Lee Chan, the main beat reporter for my website (NinersNation), is a full on peer to 49ers press corps (reporters for the SF Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and San Jose Mercury News). In fact, she is the one who broke the story about Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protest. In Philadelphia, Jimmy Kempski has gone from fan to fan posts to writer to SB Nation site coordinator to working for the Philadelphia Inquirer's website to being hired away as the marquee reporter for the PhillyVoice, with a national profile -- in five years.
posted by msalt at 2:26 PM on August 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


I never thought journalism was in the same category as modeling or the film industry - being so appealing that young people are willing to be exploited just to get a foot in the door, but here we are.

It's really always been this way in entry-level journalism, even in the days of print.
posted by Miko at 2:33 PM on August 15, 2017 [10 favorites]


> It absolutely is a path to career advancement.

Some participants in MLM schemes get paid as well. The question you're continuing to whistle past (while also providing valuable context) is whether all participants have adequate information about their prospects for advancement as they climb each step in the ladder. For every Jimmy Kempski, how many Jake Pavorskys are there? And for every Pavorsky, how many other folks get lured in with the promise of being able to turn their hobby into a jobby but never see a dime?
posted by tonycpsu at 2:38 PM on August 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


I never thought journalism was in the same category as modeling or the film industry - being so appealing that young people are willing to be exploited just to get a foot in the door, but here we are.

Pretty much the first thing I found out when I graduated college (in 2006), was that any job that a 10 year old knows exists has way more people interested in it than open positions, so they have the luxury of either paying like shit for long hours or requiring significant credentials up front, if not both. The only reason I have a steady job with decent pay and only moderately grueling hours is that I eventually happened into an extremely niche subfield of the legal industry that probably employs less than a thousand people worldwide and is basically impossible to explain to anyone, even the lawyers who pay our salaries.

In other words, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry in 2017 that doesn't assume there is near-infinite supply of job-seekers and exploit them accordingly. It's true to varying extents in both journalism and anything related to sports, but also restaurants, banking, tech, movies, academia, trucking, and so on.
posted by Copronymus at 2:42 PM on August 15, 2017 [15 favorites]


Copro--do you do transfer pricing analysis???
posted by radicalawyer at 2:45 PM on August 15, 2017


Seriously, it can't be stressed enough how hard Gawker Media has been gunning for Vox from the minute that site launched. The main site has had a LOLvox story weekly.

Does the article have merit? Maybe. But it also has to be viewed in the context of being part of an ongoing campaign run by a business competitor.

[And to prove my point about how long this has been going on, I posted the previous two paragraphs in a thread almost three years ago.]
posted by Ian A.T. at 2:47 PM on August 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


This thread is definitely becoming a compelling argument for basic income payments.
posted by Ber at 2:50 PM on August 15, 2017 [12 favorites]




The question you're continuing to whistle past (while also providing valuable context) is whether all participants have adequate information about their prospects for advancement as they climb each step in the ladder. For every Jimmy Kempski, how many Jake Pavorskys are there? And for every Pavorsky, how many other folks get lured in with the promise of being able to turn their hobby into a jobby but never see a dime?

Lured in? This isn't ITT Technical School with ads on late night TV, or Mary Kay Cosmetics. No one pays to play or take classes (unlike comedy and acting). No one needs to recruit people, you have a constant stream of applicants; it's more like vetting them to weed out the incompetent.

Are there people who think writing -- any kind of writing -- is the path to a high-salary career? I sure hope not. Certainly no one at SB Nation ever told me anything like that. I approached them, after working (for free) at a local Oregon website that enabled me to cover PAC-10 football with full press credentials.

All media and show business careers are similar in my experience (and I've worked professionally in film, TV, standup comedy, book publishing, print journalism and web journalism over my years). There is some glamor and status involved, so you always have more people than jobs chronically. These fields all have entry level jobs, and I've done most of them. They all winnow drastically and very few people ever pay all of their bills through in any of these fields, while a few do well. They're all pretty fun jobs, as jobs go.

Of all these jobs, sportswriting in the current age is by far the easiest to get paid for as a newbie, and the least amount of work, and SB Nation pays the most. (But let me know if you have a better destination.) Also, unlike print sports journalism and TV, you aren't expected to have a degree or do time as a "cub reporter" or local anchor in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere for your first couple of jobs. You don't need nearly as much talent as in acting or standup comedy, or looks as in acting or TV/film work.
posted by msalt at 3:44 PM on August 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Copro--do you do transfer pricing analysis???

Nope, conflicts of interest analysis, specifically trying to make sure the firm isn't going to violate ethical rules or even just piss off an existing client by taking on new work.
posted by Copronymus at 3:51 PM on August 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Nice to see that Gawker Media hasn't dropped its venerable tradition of attacking its competitors for things that it does itself.

Ultimately it's a writer who works for Gawker doing this, though. I mean - I'm sure it's easier for them to write about this focusing on a different company (even if they are able to throw in an offhand acknowledgement of the role of their own) but it's not like they don't have a legitimate interest in the issue. This isn't Nick Denton, it's a person who has had a zillion internships and freelance gigs.
posted by atoxyl at 5:25 PM on August 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Doodly boop / weedly-dee / don't be a chump / don't work for freeeeeeee
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:10 PM on August 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


I see this in a completely different context actually. The people who work for Gizmodo media (new name, less likely to provoke lawsuits) have been pushing for unionization for other online media. They unionized a while ago and any time there looks to be a union fight at another online magazine/content provider, they immediately start ragging on management if there is any resistance. I can't find the most recent one, but Slate's writers unionized and I read at least one, if not two, articles going on about how writers deserve a fair wage. SBNation is a direct competitor to Deadspin. SBNation is paying less than what the Deadspin writers view as a standard/fair wage. Part of me thinks that they are terrified that Univision is going to decide that the union is not worth the trouble and replace half of them with contract labor and the rest of me thinks that they are actually going in for good old fashion solidarity. Given how SBNation is currently organized, they are miles away from unionizing, but trying for what the Deadspin authors see as some financial justice is a step in the right direction.

I may be wrong, this may just be Gizmodo shitting on Vox. But I'd bet that at least part of this is online writers trying to elevate the perception and payment for creating content in general and preventing this stuff for getting handed out for free.
posted by Hactar at 10:17 PM on August 15, 2017 [8 favorites]


I think my Cincinnati Reds site was the second overall to go live at SB Nation, behind Bleed Cubbie Blue.

I can remember equity/options being discussed in a very preliminary way for site managers - the idea being that would help soften the blow for working unpaid for years. Which it probably would have, but it also looked pretty unlikely once they got to hundreds of blogs and site managers, and that turned out to be the case.

Back in the day, they didn't pay anything but you could make something like $5k-$10k a year selling links to ticket scalpers. I wish I could say exactly how much I made doing that, but I don't have the records. Pretty much all the sites did that, up to and including founder Blez's Athletics Nation.

At the time I doubt any of us fully understood we were contributing to spam and the gaming of search engines, but it did make it feel worth it enough, for what was a part time deal. You also scored a fair amount of swag in the form of books, video games, dvds, and so on. A company randomly sent me a cell phone with a year's free service once? For a baseball blog? It was a strange time.

There's some truth to it being a big enough platform to move up if you're good. The guy I handed the site over to does stats for Fox Sports Ohio Reds broadcasts now, and he's written some books.

Felt like a more innocent time. I don't know that it started with bad intentions (and I like Markos and all, nothing bad to say about him), but it's pretty wild to me that 10+ years after I left they are still barely paying anyone.
posted by imabanana at 11:05 PM on August 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


> Lured in? This isn't ITT Technical School with ads on late night TV, or Mary Kay Cosmetics. No one pays to play or take classes (unlike comedy and acting). No one needs to recruit people, you have a constant stream of applicants; it's more like vetting them to weed out the incompetent.

I understand that the demand side of the employment equation creates circumstances under which people willingly take unpaid positions. My wife is a freelance reporter for the local paper, so I see firsthand the amount of shit that her and her peers are expected to do for below minimum wage. I also recognize she's in a far better position than many of her peers. Still, the simple fact that more people want to do a certain job doesn't mean that employers are blameless. The Deadspin piece highlights some very clear signs of SBNation exploiting workers. The fact that this exploitation hasn't been determined to be illegal yet via the same "independent contractor" loopholes that Uber uses to exploit their drivers doesn't mean that it's right.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:04 AM on August 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


99% of websites rely on reader engagement, whether comments to keep people coming back or fan posts or as the bulk of content, like ... Metafilter. Deadspin does a whole series every year on "why team X sucks" that is nothing but compiled insults submitted for free, which is one of their most-read regular features.

Viewed critically, including Deadspin's obsession with SB Nation and competition with them, I don't see clear evidence of anything because they haven't established any credibility or objectivity. Their sketch doesn't gibe with my experience, though I'm not a site coordinator so who knows? But iirc one example was that a coordinator had to write "2 or 3 articles a week." That's onerous?
posted by msalt at 8:31 AM on August 16, 2017


Deadspin doesn't have to be unbiased or have good intentions to have discovered signs of exploitation, or at the very least, people who feel that they were exploited or misled. The quotes they got from writers and the letters they published from people who worked on the site stand by themselves as evidence of people who feel they got the shaft. There could be contrary evidence on the other side, and I would count your own pleasant experience with the site among that evidence, but no amount of contrary evidence takes away the grievances chronicled in the stories.

I agree with you that we're not seeing the complete story in the Deadspin reporting, but I do see a story, and one that hits pretty close to home. I'm very glad you've been treated better, and hope that there are more of you in the future, and fewer of the folks who feel wronged by SB Nation.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:48 AM on August 16, 2017 [2 favorites]


One factor may be the size of the website / team's fanbase. I write for the site of a popular NFL team, and they have the budget to fly the beat reporter to road games, etc. SB Nation has a huge number of team sites, some of which would be very slow - small conference college baseball teams for example.

They rely heavily on the $600 a month figure for shock value, but it sounds like that's the minumum wage. It would be ridiculous for an NFL team but not so much for a smaller site, esp. if 2-3 articles a week is in fact all that is required. (One thing about SB Nation is that coordinators do a lot of minimal posts designed just to start fan discussion, like "This player was dismissed from the team after a DUII, according to ESPN. Do you think this will hurt the team?) That's the kind of spin I'm suspicious of here.

As always though, the solution to an underpaying overworking employer is to leave and tell them off. That's what I did with the first website I wrote for.
posted by msalt at 9:37 AM on August 16, 2017




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