While it's certainly a shame that freelancers struggle with being underpaid - I'm more concerned with how this impoverishes the culture. If these jobs pay so p

While it's certainly a shame that freelancers struggle with being underpaid - I'm more concerned with how this impoverishes the culture. If these jobs pay so poorly, it follows that many potential journalists will do something else instead. The best potential journalists will likely have the best chance of finding more lucrative careers. What this means is that we will be left with hobbyists or less capable people doing journalism. Ideally, journalism would serve a coordination function for the culture - spreading important facts and starting important discussions. If this task is being done by the less capable, or by those who are distracted by poverty, that seems problematic - like finding out your brain isn't getting enough nutrients and so will be operating at a deficit. For the author in particular, my first thoughts were that, if he could bring in two hundred thousand dollars worth of traffic consistently for the publications he writes for, then he should be able to bring in a sizable portion of that to his own website surely, and keep a higher percentage for himself. On the other hand, if this were a random article on someone's blog, would I have read it? Well, yes, probably so if it were on the front page of hackernews - but would it have got there? Hard to say. Confusing but grim news. Tough way to start the morning...