Want a job? Work for free and send your resume in a box

Much better for the free market if the potential employees don't understand the market.

 

Which is why (for a few more weeks anyway), it isn't legal to try and prevent your employees from discussing what they're paid. The sooner working people realize their bosses and their bosses' peers are not their friends and stop listening to their "helpful" advice, the better.

 

Unless you're Bleacher Report or SBNation. Or a recruiting site.

Look: I don't like these freebie sites any more than anyone else. But they cut into markets dangling prestige and access in front of folks, and it works.

hell, it worked for Bill Simmons back in the day.

Your field is just...different. Honestly, you have a skill that you didn't spend 12 years in school honing. You went out and learned it. And here's the other thing: Your field is, to some degree, a meritocracy. You're good at it, and that quality pays off.

In journalism it might...and it might not. There are finite established jobs in a market, and the market is *not necessarily* a meritocracy. Sports journalism is alive and interesting again - after a brutal 90s of hoary cliches and old white guy jokes - precisely because of the Internet, which makes it easier for voices - who might doing it for free - to get seen.

I freely admit it's a weakness of the industry. It's too intractable. And one of the way to, for a lack of better phrase, get editors attention is to better content than their own employees do. (Which happens often enough.)

Look at conservative political blogs. If you believe that the media is so liberal as you say it is, of course some of the more prominent bloggers weren't going to get a chance there. Hell, no one does; local newspapers, to their detriment, guard political opinions like gold. So what happened? It all got forced online - where, initially, a lot of folks wrote for free. It spawned an empire, eventually.

History - and journalism - is sometimes written by those with nothing to lose.

 

While entitled to certain information, employees don't rely on their employers for their market research.

 

I got into the business by walking into my hometown paper during my first semester in college and offering to work for free. That led to stringer gigs and eventually a full-time job (at $6.50/hr.). That was more than 20 years ago, though, and I would never encourage anyone to do that now. It would be like someone telling me in 2000 that I didn't need a college degree to get a good job because they didn't need one in 1978. Times change. You work for free now, that doesn't tell an employer, "Hey, this guy really wants it, he should be rewarded." Instead it says, "Hey, this guy works for free, no reason to change that."

 

Just sell drugs, kids. At least it pays.

 

I was never an intern. I couldn't survive working for free. I've had to hold a job since I was 14. When I wasn't in class, I was making fuckin pizzas. I had to pay for everything when I moved out. Yes, I wrote letters and met editors to get my first part-time newspaper jobs. But I sure as fuck didn't work for free. If the Sbarro could pay me, so could the newspaper.

 

Cheryl Strayed was $85K in debt when she sold Wild. Her rent checks were still bouncing three years later.

This after receiving a $100K deal for her first book and paying off $50K in credit card debt.

She wrote her Dear Sugar column for free.

Moral of the story -- don't use credit cards?

http://www.vulture.com/2017/01/cheryl-strayed-debt-wild-scratch-interview.html

Good anthology out on how authors make money:

 

Eh. Yes and no on the idea of colleges going all in on economic diversity. There are some incredible tuition reduction programs, but the schools that can still take a pretty high percentage of their students early decision, which has the opposite effect. I get why they do it - lock in as much as half your class early through a binding process - but it gives a huge advantage to students with parents and guidance counselors who understand the process and playing the odds, and both of those tend to be found in schools filled with socioeconomically advantaged students. Guidance counselors at poorer schools are often focused on getting kids to graduation.

College admissions is a game to a large degree, and it's concerning that colleges use that game to their own advantage, to the disadvantage of those who are already disadvantaged.

 

He isn't dumb. Maybe some of his tweets are dumb.
I'm wondering when he worked for free though. According to Wiki, he graduated from Northwestern in 2000. I remember seeing him at the winter meetings in 02 or 03 and he was with ESPN. Guess maybe he interned or volunteered somewhere for a short while, but he had a pretty good paying job shortly after graduating.