That's the bitterness that the top commenter here referred to. The journalists I know are largely resigned to being crapped on by whoever they work for. They create all the value (similar to a programmer at a startup run by biz-ev guys) while someone makes the money and then gives them a small piece of it. They're use to getting crapped on like this.

That said, they're really picky about who they let crap on them. Someone might let the HuffPo crap on them so they can share space with celebrities and get lots of hits on their story. Someone might let the NYTimes crap on them, because, it's the New York Times!

So if this startup's going to run the same game, they'll need to have a good reason for journalists to want to get crapped on by them.

I think you nailed it. Essentially, what they are up to is to automate the content production, because that could make them (not those journalists) rich. Demand Media did it with how-to articles using SEO, now these guys wants to do that with journalism. Much harder task, IMHO. Good luck...

Nothing sinister here. We give journalists 80% of the _revenue_ from their content. We can make it up on volume. I updated the CFJ to be clearer.