Working with Content Mill Editors

In my last office job, I worked with a writer-editor who I will refer to as Dobbs. Dobbs was meticulous and organized, both good qualities for an editor. He was also a consummate empire builder. He demanded and got special office furniture, claiming he could not do his job effectively without it. I heard him repeatedly boast later about how the whole affair was simply to make him look important. Another of Dobbs' coups was creating the inter-office Staff Committee, which made him sound busy and important, but in reality that committee was so utterly irrelevant that it was not discovered that he was still listed as chairman on the committee's e-mail list until more than three years after he left that job. Dobbs often had to work with authors who were well-connected with his boss, which meant he couldn't get tough with them when it came to deadlines and editorial choices. He made no secret of how he would take out his frustrations with those favored authors on those other authors who didn't know his boss and were not so lucky.

Dobbs eventually left that job to purse his dream of being an arts and theater writer, and at that pursuit he floundered. I lost track of him after that, but thinking about him makes me muse on this notion: If Dobbs found himself out of job during the economic crisis, I have little doubt that he has taken up freelance or contract copy editing on the internet. He might very well be working on my articles now, and that is not a thought that makes me very happy.

The Cast of Characters
If you have worked as a freelance writer for different websites for long enough, you have a slate of stories to tell about the vagaries and inconsistencies of the system. For example, you could log into Associated Content one morning to discover that the 9th and 10th articles in your series of camping gear reviews were rejected or received low-ball offers from an anonymous Content Manager, only to have the next string of articles accepted as normal. The articles all followed the same model and each did a popular piece of gear, so what was wrong with those two that wasn't wrong with the other work?

Anyone who has worked for Demand Studios has had a frustrating experience like this: you have perfected a method for writing appliance repair How To's so that 9 out of 10 are accepted without a re-write, and the 10th comes back with requests for minor revisions. Then one article comes back telling you to explain how to drive a nail with a hammer and other asinine revisions. None of the others required such things, but Demand Studios will insist you do everything requested anyway.

An important part of working as a writer on the internet is realizing that copy editors and content managers are just like the people you might meet at any office. Most of them are good people who, barring the occasional bad day, want to do at least a decent job and get paid for it. Some are ambitious and highly motivated. However, there will also always the minority who are none of these things. You also encounter people in the office environment who are ambitious, but not especially principled. Then there are the ones who simply want to get paid, decent day's work or no. As much as the various content mills on the internet might like to deny it, whether it be in their office or among their contractors, there are people just like my old colleague Dobbs on their payroll. These office politicians and sluggards both write for and edit for them.

When I get an article demanding ridiculous and utterly over-the-top revisions, is that someone who is trying to look good by demanding a lot of meaningless work? Maybe. I've certainly had the experience of people who tried to score points dreaming up a project and then shifting the bulk of the work onto their colleagues before. Lowball offers? The manager who lowballs everything to try to earn a cost-cutting bonus is such a universal standard that the comic strip Dilbert recycles it on a monthly basis.

"Anonymous" Makes It Worse

Compounding the effects of these empire builders, would-be office tyrants and wasting sluggards who manage to always find work somewhere is the famous Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory, as first described by cartoonist John Gabriel. Also think about is the Stanford Prison Experiment, where some students were made guards and others prisoners to see how they would behave.

In an office environment, there is a moderating influence on this sort of thing because you have a human face, and any abuses can be dealt with by complaints leveled directly at the offender and at the offender's boss. Your main defense is that repeat offenses establish a pattern that everyone involved will become aware of, which is a major deterrent. Anonymity strips all of those inhibitors away. It is a scientifically-proven encourager of abusive behavior.

You cannot even begin to address serious problems if you are prevented from identifying any systematic pattern of offense and must deal with each issue individually. This also prevents you from using the other great office place defense against malevolent co-worker behavior: namely, identifying common problems and presenting complaints as a group.

Dealing With It
An internet writer's tools for dealing with problematic anonymous copy editors and managers may not seem very impressive, but they can be made to work. The two most important ones being vigilance and patience

First, never be afraid to call the pot and kettle black in a professional matter. While the forums of many content mill sites are filled with cheerleaders who think that always praising the boss is the road to success (brown-nosing is another phenomenon that carries over from the real world workplace), any rational and experienced writer knows that all your clients really care about are results. The ultimate question is whether you produce a consistently good product. Compared to that, making mature complaints about how things work doesn't even register.

Second, be patient and don't lose your perspective. Remember that the source of your trouble are the same people you might encounter if you were working in a cubicle instead of at Starbucks. Real, full-time jobs and the offices that go with them are full of frustrating inanities. The slings and arrows of freelance writing for the internet might be outrageous, but they are no more or less outrageous than what goes on in the real world work place. They are merely different.