
AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out - dreambird
http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/
======
aresant
"AOL paid us as “independent contractors,"

AOL is treading a fine, fine line there.

The IRS defines an independent contractor as:

"The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the
payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not
what will be done and how it will be done."

This is a notoriously ambiguous definition but with AOL's rigorous guidelines,
deadlines, and instructions it sure seems like this isn't an "independent"
work force.

[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179115,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179115,00.html)

~~~
chopsueyar
That is not the only criteria.

See this comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2666507>

The other issue is, as a contractor, the contractor retains all copyrights to
the material created. Work for hire does not apply in this instance.

He could send a DMCA takedown notice and have all of his articles removed, or
organize all the other unemployed writers and coordinate a massive DMCA
takedown letter writing campaign.

~~~
tptacek
Virtually all contractors in our field work under "work-for-hire" clauses. I
am baffled by the people voting you up and those questioning you down. It is
not "in the Constitution" that two parties can't agree to a binding contract
that transfers ownership of work product.

The IRS tests for contractor vs. employee status break down to:

* Does the worker control the "how" as well as the "what" of their task, or do they have to e.g. work at proscribed locations during set hours?

* Does the worker control the business aspects of their work, for instance the cost of tools, the expenses incurred, &c.

* Has the company employing the worker done things to create a de facto employee relationship, such as offering benefits?

None of these are bright-line differences. Contractors routinely work on-site,
9-5, using tools provided by their employers; however, care has been taken in
structuring the relationship (for instance, by working corp-to-corp with a
large consulting firm or head shop that itself maintains a W2 relationship
with the workers).

It is indeed possible or even likely that AOL is treading a fine line by
1099'ing the people writing its content. On the other hand, AOL can afford
pretty good lawyers, and it's equally likely that every aspect of their
workflow has been structured to avoid imputing employee status to people doing
piecework writing for them. You should tone down your stridency. There are a
lot of people on HN that consult professionally.

~~~
chopsueyar
With regard to the Constitution, I was merely stating that the initial owner
of a copyright in a work be the author.

So, without any other sort of agreement, the guy who made it is the guy who
owns it.

The IRS employee vs contractor 'test' includes:

Behavioral: This includes type of instruction given, degree of instruction,
evaluation systems, and training -
[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179111,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179111,00...).

Financial: This includes significant investment, reimbursed expenses,
opportunity for profit or loss, services available to the market, and method
of payment -
[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179113,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179113,00...).

Type of Relationship: This includes written contracts, employment benefits,
permanency of the relationship, and services provided as key activities of the
business -
[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179116,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179116,00...).

This issue has been around since at least 1989. Do you remember this?

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/04/01/businesspropicks-u...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/04/01/businesspropicks-
us-findlaw-dont-treat-c-idUSTRE53063S20090401)

As for being strident, you are free to downvote. I am enjoying this discourse.

------
SemanticFog
There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I
interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs
had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business.

One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could
do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to
write. Then he leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke, and told me:

"You kid come into this business thinking you're going to make a difference.
Pretty soon you find out, you're just filling the space around the ads."

He was right, actually. So I got into high tech instead, and have been doing
startups ever since. Not sure I always make a difference, but at least I'm
trying, instead of just filling space...

~~~
zwischenzug
Not just local papers.

I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.

I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government
movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from
another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that
weekend.

They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to
generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my
three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of
that.

Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely
separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.

I have to say I read this article and thought: isn't this what journos are
paid to do?

~~~
mattmanser
Well, I guess they can't all be Robert Fisk.

I get the impression that it's rather a lot like rock stardom, a lot of
wanabees, with a few receiving all the pay/accolades.

------
ChuckFrank
Creating content online is NOT a viable business model. Recent history is
littered with new content creators, and they've failed. The viable business
model is either to host other content - YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, GrooveShark,
Earbits, etc - Or to create content that is agnostic as to their use -
Hollywood Studios, NY Publishers, Music Labels. - So either AOL should
transition to a creator, or transition to a online host. It can't expect to
have a viable future by creating content for online only. This is true of AOL
and any other business model that tries this. JustinTV - Hosts, ESPN - Hosts,
The WKUK - Creators, Monty Python - Creators. So please, once and for all,
let's stop imagining these Online Studios, or these Online Magazine, or even
worse, these Ipad Magazines. Instead think Vice. They've got music, magazines,
tv, movies, and they don't care where you see it. <http://www.vbs.tv/> \-
<http://www.viceland.com/> . Just a bunch of Canadians that thought that they
could rewrite the magazine business model by giving away their magazines for
free. And look where that's taken them. So to recap. Make your choice, either
host or create, and abide by their distinct rules.

~~~
hugh3
Plenty of folks are making money by creating and serving content online.

~~~
ChuckFrank
Who leads your list?

~~~
icefox
HackerNews :)

~~~
corin_
Well Hacker News doesn't make any revenue and acts as a community project of a
company, not a profit-aiming brand.

~~~
mattmanser
It also produces 0 content, merely comments.

It's an aggregator.

We've all got used to the aggregators like google making all the money by
convincing everyone content should be free. It was the greatest and long-term
wise worst achievement of the dot com boom.

~~~
JeremyBanks
> _It also produces 0 content, merely comments._

I wouldn't say those are mutually exclusive.

------
kylelibra
Maybe this is an idealistic thought, but I think this trend of writing SEO
laden garbage is what will finally make quality journalism behind paywalls
work. People will eventually be driven to pay for decent content, unable to
put up with irrelevant half baked articles churned out at breakneck pace.

~~~
Legion
I pay for publications like The Economist and The Atlantic (both of which I
read entirely digitally) for exactly that reason. I want quality content when
I sit down to spend my precious reading time on something.

I can hardly imagine spending that time reading insipid, content mill junk.
Who puts so low of a value on their time?

~~~
Animus7
>Who puts so low of a value on their time?

Sadly, lot of people, it would seem. AOL's still in business.

~~~
rbanffy
The intersection of good journalism and articles about Lady Gaga is a very
small set.

------
dpapathanasiou
_“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good
or bad?” I said._

 _“Not really,” was the reply._

If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write
a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without
the stress.

~~~
jerf
Obviously a straight-up Markov Chain generator isn't going to work, but a
smarter system that would allow you to basically sketch the article and then
have the system automatically babble in English to fill out the word count
while not actually needing any additional information strikes me as feasible,
though not trivial.

Somebody's doing something similar for sports reporting:
[http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/18/robot-journalist-
writ...](http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/18/robot-journalist-writes-a-
better-story-than-human-sports-reporter/) You'd have to tweak it for a
different domain but I'm sure that would be feasible for your average gossip-
rag type story.

~~~
hugh3
The Motley Fool also uses automatically-generated articles. For instance if
you google the phrase _"Being able to retire rich, or at least comfortable, is
the goal of almost any investor"_ you'll find hundreds of articles from
fool.com, each posing as an analysis of a particular company, and all
generated with an algorithm which is fairly obvious after reading a couple of
'em.

They're not completely worthless, though. Real data + automated analysis is
far better than no data or no analysis.

~~~
wging
OUCH. No mention of the contraction of the newspaper industry when discussing
Gannett?

>Next, we want to ensure that Gannett's stock has the ability to rise over the
next five, 10, or 20 years. A company that's growing its net income has the
best possible chance to see its share price rise over time. Of course, we
can't predict the future, but we can look back to get an idea of how the
company has performed in the past in order to try to ensure future earnings
growth. Over the past five years, Gannett has shrunk its net income at an
annual rate of 13.9%. Unfortunately, Gannett has run into its own share of
problems, and the financial collapse of 2008 certainly couldn't have helped
either. So the company has been unable to grow earnings, which doesn't exactly
mean that it won't in the future, but it's certainly not the greatest of
signs.

from [http://www.fool.com/retirement/general/2011/04/26/should-
you...](http://www.fool.com/retirement/general/2011/04/26/should-you-retire-
with-gannett.aspxhttp://www.fool.com/retirement/general/2011/04/26/should-you-
retire-with-gannett.aspx)

It's kind of clear that it's auto-generated after just one. The only other
possibility would be that "Jordan DiPetro" had a real point to make about what
stock stats can tell you without any real knowledge...

------
IgorPartola
The OP talks about how in the age where there are more readers than ever,
writers are undervalued. What the OP fails to mention is the quality of
readers and writers. A reader who consumes 100,000 pages worth of Facebook
statuses is not really much of a reader. Historically, reading was used as a
means to communicate ideas. Think Machiavelli, Aristotle, Nietzsche. Now it is
used for communicating a much larger scope of information: "Lady Gaga Pantless
in Paris". You cannot compare a writer that writes the Illiad and a writer
that writes TV Show reviews of shows they've never seen. They are not the same
category.

------
yangez
Anyone else notice how good of a writer this guy actually is? Throughout the
article he takes you through an emotional journey that very effectively
portrays AOL as a soulless monster. (The third-to-last paragraph is a very
good example of this.)

His words may or may not have merit, but his writing style is extremely
persuasive. He got his message across and certainly made an impact. If only
AOL took advantage of this, we might be reading an entirely different article.

------
kylelibra
Alec Baldwin was the celebrity in question referenced in the article in case
you're wondering.

~~~
omarchowdhury
The author did give us the keywords to find this out on our own.

~~~
kylelibra
I realize that, but I figured I would stick it in the comments in case it
helped anyone.

~~~
omarchowdhury
I didn't mean to undermine you, only that I noticed a cleverness in the
author's placement of the keywords. He gave us the exact keywords to find the
actor who had issues with him, without directly stating who it was. This goes
against the whole keyword driven doctrine at AOL, where the keywords used are
explicit in who they are trying to promote.

------
spaghetti
Just an aside: would have been awesome if the writer created an article
generating program. He could feed the program a few key words (perhaps just
the name of the TV show). The program could scrape or be manually fed some
information from Google trends. Then add some scraping of data from existing
articles. Use a markov chain to keep the content fresh and you're good to go!
I'm just thinking of the sentence generation via markov chain from Programming
Pearls and the hilarious auto-generated computer science papers that were
submitted and accepted by some journal.

~~~
mitcheme
It would be hilarious but I'm not so sure it would work that well. I think one
of the big reasons the scigen papers passed for real was because a lot of
people will assume that if they can't understand a paper, it's just gone over
their heads. There's enough real jargon in them to reinforce that assumption.
Entertainment news is a lot more accessible so it would be pretty obvious.

~~~
spaghetti
You're right that entertainment news is much more accessible. However there's
also much more pre-existing "content" related to $mainStreamTopic at our
disposal for training our future pulitzer-prize-winning markov-chain-based
authors :-p

------
MatthewPhillips
This just makes me think: why in the world would any one want to become a
writer these days? There isn't much money in it, unless you get lucky and hit
it big. I understanding having a passion, but this is one passion that should
be relegated to hobby time. Am I wrong on this? I'm just not seeing the
economic viability of writing sentences and having people (whether readers or
advertisers) paying you proportionate to the amount of work you put in.

~~~
stevenj
Funny you say that, 'cause people tell me the same thing about startups.

But as Bezos once said: "You don't choose your passions. Your passions choose
you."

~~~
scott_s
I think it's more, "You don't choose your passions. You will randomly do many
things in your life and some of those things will interest you so much that
you feel compelled to keep doing them."

It's not as pithy, though.

------
wallywax
Are things really at a state where 35k is considered an impressive salary for
a journalist in the US? I know programmers are spoiled, but I was kind of
shocked at the implication that that was thought of as big bucks. Sad.

------
earbitscom
I am a huge supporter of creatives and artists. That being said, I have only
partial sympathy for this guy. Work is work and we all need it, particularly
creatives, but when you take a job writing about things you don't know
anything about, you can't complain that you're being asked to do so. If he
hadn't seen the most popular shows on television, he took a job he wasn't
qualified for. That's fine, but then, he couldn't be bothered to research the
industry he was covering - when that research required sitting in front of a
TV and watching The Simpsons. That's not exactly slave labor.

It's a shame that content production has become the ad mill that it has, and
writing about that from an objective viewpoint with all of this guy's internal
data would have been good journalism. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for
someone who got paid $35k a year to write about cartoons and couldn't be
bothered to watch some of them in his spare time.

~~~
thyrsus
I inferred that he was being asked to write about 16 (one article every half
hour for eight hours) specific show episodes for a deadline about 12 hours
after they aired; even with a Tivo, how would you both watch and write?

~~~
earbitscom
I believe he said it was fewer articles (something like 10), but what I'm
referring to is his comment about having _never_ seen many of the shows. The
minute you take a job writing about television, you get started familiarizing
yourself with the most popular shows. When you're assigned to a new show, you
watch one or two episodes. If you're covering some more often than others, you
put that one on while you fold your laundry. It's not as if he has a job
reviewing tourist locations. Point is, you become an expert and suck it up.
Particularly in a field this competitive, you spend time outside of the actual
writing getting up to speed. To suggest that's too much to ask lacks a certain
professionalism.

------
heyrhett
AOL's plan to "beat the internet" with a content farm isn't working out so
well yet?

------
mihar
It's a sad sad story. I love reading great content and I never had problems
paying for great content.

I've been a subscriber to paid magazines/papers and I'll continue to be one to
digital ones.

But I guess my kind is rare and of course the majority always wins.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I take a slightly less pessimistic view. Its an economic process that is in
the process of balancing itself.

There are a lot of people who only want "free" information (which is to say
free news, free reviews, free self help advice, etc) and of course providing
information is not 'free' as it costs real dollars to host it, to maintain it,
to fix it up after the web site gets hacked etc.

To enable it to stay 'free' people put advertisements on the page which the
advertiser pays the costs of hosting the content.

That creates an incentive to monetize the difference between the cost of the
content and the revenue from the ads. Given the incentive all sorts of
suppliers have arisen, from domain squatters at the low end, to businesses
like Demand Media and AOL apparently.

If you look at content creation you will see that this is creating 'content'
at an unsustainable rate. At some point, a small population at first, and then
growing larger, of people will say "I'll _pay_ you for information that is
'better' rather than pay the cost of wading through the free crap to get to
the good stuff."

When that switch reaches a large enough number of readers, I believe it will
'spontaneously' create the actual market for purely digital information
sources. The blend of subscriber revenue and modest ad revenue will create a
better reader experience and quality companies will emerge to take advantage
of that.

~~~
ericd
Or perhaps article spam filters like HN will become more popular?

------
lefstathiou
FYI If you havent taken the time to read the comments posted to the actual
article I strongly recommend you do. They're priceless - perhaps better than
article itself.

------
btipling
<http://www.aoltv.com/bloggers/oliver-miller/page/1/> are his articles.

------
aj700
"AOL has a plan. The plan involves the future;"

Okay, but the future has a plan. The plan doesn't involve AOL. This and the
fact they refuse to cancel your account. What a pathetic company. Good job
stockholders are dumb.

Every bonus taking banker raped the banks' stockholders. But nobody seems to
care. Stockholders come bottom, behind customers, employees, and bigger
creditors. It's not quite how capitalism was supposed to work.

------
mckoss
Why are advertisers paying $9 to $20 CPM to AOL when they generally pay a tiny
fraction of that to advertise across most web sites and on Google?

------
lfnik
As I as reading this I thought how eerily familiar to Huffington Post this
sounded. Then I remembered who Huffington Post was sold to.

------
brown9-2
Does anyone think that AOL's model here actually stands a chance of
succeeding? Who wants low-quality, crap content?

~~~
gscott
People who only read the first paragraph anyway and people who play FarmVille.

------
mikealle233
AOL's new "business model" is one Google algo change away from going poof.
Clearly after Panda, Google is out to get rid of business models like this.
Unfortunately they kind of suck at differentiating quality from non quality,
but it's crystal clear they're trying.

------
ck2
Not just AOL, broadcast media, like mainstream news channels seem to work that
way too as far as buzzwords and what topics to cover.

Like you'd never know the US was in three wars or about to default on the
deficit the past couple of weeks. Only PBS was mostly immune and BBC World.

------
hernan7
Actually, it's a former AOL contractor.

------
afterburner
Side note: Lady Gaga is pantless everywhere. So, a good and safe choice of
words.

~~~
afterburner
Haha, of course a downvote. No, really, she's pantless everywhere. This is not
a joke. Maybe the AOL writer who came up with that example knew what they were
doing; I thought it was an interesting possibility.

------
Hisoka
AOL has a responsibility to its shareholders first and foremost. Making
employees write about stuff they don't know about is not exactly slave
labor... if they don't like it, then just quit, it's that simple.

------
Andi
Cocksuckers ...

------
nemik
:( Those poor old regular words. RIP.

------
mohsen
did any body start to lose respect for this guys about half way through the
article?

I suppose we all need money, but there is a limit, by god, there is a limit.

~~~
ohashi
Not really. 35k salary for a writing gig, presumably nothing even comparable
is out there for the author. Judging by the last sentence, that dread of
losing the job was valid.

