New On Dangerous Harvests

I can imagine that many of you have noticed the color changes on the blog. A regular reader wrote me a few weeks ago, requesting that I change the color scheme because she was having a hard time reading the old one on her computer screen. Looking at it, I realized that maybe more of you might also be having trouble, especially if reading it from a battery run computer not currently plugged in. Or perhaps on a phone. In any event, I changed the colors to the shades of green you saw last week. And then received some more feedback on those changes, which led to the current blue/green approach. Hopefully, this works better for most of you.

In addition, after all of this talk about money and writing, I decided to add a "donations" button to the blog (see sidebar). I have always felt like Dangerous Harvests is an offering to my readers, something that allows me to share a bit about my spiritual life and views, and also to have excellent conversations with those readers who choose to do so. In the past, I stood against the idea of making income off the work I'm doing here, for a variety of reasons.

As the blog has evolved, not only has it become a part of my spiritual practice, but it has also helped me to extend the notion of sangha, or community beyond the brick and mortar and beyond the local. In addition, as my own understanding of sangha has evolved over the past few years, in great part due to my role as Board president of Clouds in Water - my "home" zen center - I have realized that interdependence also includes offering opportunities for others to give back in the ways that they can. Discussions we have had on our board about sangha finances have led to discovering creative ways to open doors to giving back to the community. Giving time. Giving material items of need. Giving mutual support. And giving money. All of these, and more have come up over the past few years, and have slowly helped reshape my own relationship to giving and receiving.

And so, I'm offering you, my readers, the opportunity to support my work financially through the donation button. I do so without any expectations really. If you feel moved to give a little financial donation, great! If not, no worries. I fully intend to continue writing as I have been, as this blog continues to benefit me in many ways. However, it just seemed time to recognize that it's ok to have a donations ask on the blog, and that doing so doesn't diminish anything being done here.

Thank you to all who have supported this blog through reading, commenting, and offering other means of support as well. It's all part of sangha - of sharing community together, and growing along the way. Bows.

* Photo above is from my garden. Enjoy!

Writers, "Free Labor," and the Politics of Online Media

As a writer, I'm very interested in the ways in which writers are being treated by online media outlets. One of the reasons behind my recent post about Elephant Journal was a desire to see writers, and potential writers, be treated with more respect and dignity. Although I didn't mention it in the previous post, I've grown deeply ambivalent about Elephant's policy of not paying it's regular writers anything. I get the argument that it's still a somewhat small publication in the grand scheme, and not raking in the dough, but at the same time, writers can't pay their bills with the extra bit of website traffic that comes with exposure on a site like Elephant. Where's the balance between making enough income to survive, and recognizing that said income is made as a direct result of the work being done by the writers themselves? In the case of Elephant Journal, I don't know what's appropriate.

However, in the case of the Huffington Post, which has a fair number of Buddhist and other spiritual bloggers amongst it's "staff," the lines of fairness and respect were long ago crossed. Blogger and Buddhist Joshua Eaton makes the following points:

the Huffington Post relies on 8000 to 9000 unpaid writers—euphemistically called “bloggers”—for much of its content. Many balked at AOL’s purchase of the newssite, and two labor unions—the National Writers Union and the Newspaper Guild (AFL-CIO)—have joined a boycott of the Huffington Post started by Visual Art Source. So far, Ms. Huffington has refused repeated requests to meet with union leaders.

This is hardly an isolated incident for either AOL or the Huffington Post. Earlier this month Huffington Post Politics outraged the graphic design community by holding a contest to design their Twitter logo—for free. Back in June AOL followed Huffington Post‘s lead by adding almost 6000 unpaid bloggers to Patch, a network of hyper-local news sites over which Ms. Huffington now presides. (This is aside from the fact that Patch is already run by contracted editors making $38000 to $45000 per year while working 60 to 80 hours per week and freelancers making $50 to $100 per article.)

I encourage people to read his entire post, which includes the shoddy experience he had last year as a candidate for an intern position last year with the Huff Po.

One of the reasons I bring these two publications up in the same post is that fairly or not, the kinds of criticisms being laid upon the Huffington Post are also happening to the Elephant Journal. In some ways, it's irrelevant that Huff Po's budget is in the millions of dollars, while Elephant's budget is probably no better than the annual income at a barely above minimum wage job. People see unpaid writers, increasing popularity, and increasing revenue, and the words "exploitation" and "users" come flying out of their mouths.

Now, to provide a bit of contrast, one of the webzines I write for,Life as a Human, pays it's regular writers a monthly stipend. They have done this since the beginning - I know this because I have written for them since the website was launched in February 2010. Now, the stipend isn't a lot of money, but I do believe it's a recognition of the fact that any revenue coming in to the website is due, in great part, to the quality of writing being presented. In addition, the editorial team has always treated my writing well, and frequently is excited to see new work from me coming their way. Being writers and artists themselves, they chose to share the website with their fellow writers from the beginning, even asking our imput on various design changes that have been made over the past year and a half. Although I hope to someday be bringing in more money for some of my writing than I currently do, the leadership at Life as a Human is an example worth upholding of how to support the talent that keeps it running.

I intend to write more on these issues in the future, as it's likely to remain a source of contention for all writers doing work online. Your thoughts and comments on this are encouraged here as well.

*Image by Mike Licht of notionscapital.