I Worked on the AOL Content Farm & It Changed My Life | Hacker News Reader

I Worked on the AOL Content Farm & It Changed My Life

readwriteweb.com

40 pointsdfj22514 comments

I was also at AOL in the early Weblogs, Inc. days. While we didn't look at ourselves as content farmers the same way you'd look at demand media, I definitely think the $4/post model has it's benefits. For me, it was an incentive to go through a large body of work fairly quickly. Thanks to my work at Engadget too, I was able to get a crash course in technology journalism from the master (Peter Rojas).

I often think of Weblogs, Inc. as a sort of freak of startup nature. Very little funding, but the company had a huge impact, especially on its acquirer. AOL's core publishing technology platform is Blogsmith, Weblogs, Inc.'s home grown CMS, not to mention how Engadget, Autoblog and other influential Weblogs, Inc. blogs have given other AOLers insight into what good content looks like.

As Marshall mentions in the post, I'm wondering where the new minor leagues are. I'd guess just being a regular contributor to Hacker News might be as close as there is right now.

Another ex-Weblogs Inc here (hi, Randall!)

It was the pile em up and sell em cheap model that burnt me out in the end. I genuinely spent a lot of time early on writing quality posts, getting breaking news (because I was in the UK and so awake earlier) and doing in depth analysis type articles. Then I got fed up of the pressure to constantly keep churning stuff out, and one day I looked at the crap I was writing and quit. There were tricks you could do to pump up your post quota - I remember starting WoW.com's Breakfast Topic as one such vehicle, though it was also an interesting conversation starter.

Still, I am very glad I did it. I learnt a lot about the gaming and tech industries and got a start in journalism as a result. Which I moved away from, but that was my choice.

tl;dr :

Marshall Kirkpatrick editor Mashable got his start at a content farm while working at a convenience store.

Then got hired by TechCrunch after his stories got lots of traction.

Then got hired as editor of RRW after TechCrunch.

He sees AOL's content strategy creating a similarly powerful platform for great writers to rise from the depths to the top.

Kind of an interesting counter point to current criticisms that AOL is only going to produce "quantity over quality..."

Also, RRW is looking for a writer (in some ways I think this reads like a job advertisement).

Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb co-editor, got his start...

[I think Marshall might keel over if he heard you call him that.] :)

Again this drives home a solid point that even if you're doing mechanical-turk-esque labor, if you strive to be the best in your field you'll get noticed. Content farms are, as he said, the minor leagues for a bigger tech writing gig.

I like the idea of this - work hard / you'll be rewarded, even if the current payment is meagre - BUT, I don't think that this is necessarily the case for the majority.

This guy struck it lucky. I'm not sure an exception makes the rule.

No, it drives home the point of selection bias. Someone who got noticed tells us he worked hard, we don't hear from the rest of the people.

It says nothing about whether people who work hard get noticed, or about whether if you work hard you will get noticed.

(Actually, not even that, he tells us he went to a conference and was hired by someone he schmoozed with!)

Either way your probably going to need a body of solid past work at the volume that the bigger players are after if you want to work there. I guess you can either go this route and make some small time money, or try and build your own blog following.

Of course there will be outliers who get into the good blogging jobs easier, but as he says they expect 5 quality posts a day at RRW, many probably aren't cut out for that and it's probably hard to assess without past work.

There was a great article in the new yorker a couple weeks ago about the current CEO of AOL and how he is building the largest team of journalists in the country (and possibly world). don't have it on hand at the moment but it was a great read.

>the current CEO of AOL and how he is building the largest team of journalists in the country

Journalists or people who right copy?

I'm sure someone will level a "no true Scotsman" objection at me but still ...

is there a way to download the document? pdf?

Here is a link to it: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way#-1

That is not a link to a pdf - but to a slideshow (for which I could find nothing like a print/DL button.

But no great loss: it's 58 slide. Maybe it's just me, but I found that it "ain't no SJ keynote."

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