I do agree that it can be a lousy deal for writers when they’re giving away their product. But sometimes it is not! Like Eve, I’ve written for free for many years, and enjoyed all of it. (I also am grateful for having a day job that allows me to indulge that writing.) It’s my paying gigs, the ones I take for cash, that usually aren’t as much fun.

Offering stock options or a partnership percentage to employees is a time-honored way of rewarding the people who work on a business when there’s no money in it, and I think it’s an excellent idea for any business, not just media businesses. (I think I’ll hold off on joining your cult, but thanks for the offer.)

As to whether decency is something that writers can “hang their hats on”: with respect, Matt, I don’t really see what you’re getting at. Business is always done on trust: you make a deal with a person, and if they uphold it and you uphold it everything’s cool; if one of you doesn’t, you move on and don’t come back. For contributors (often called editors), sometimes money is part of the deal (like on Gawker sites or on Curbed) and sometimes it isn’t (HuffPo); sometimes money is offered when the piece is based on significant original research but not otherwise (Juxtapoz); and often money is dreamed about, hoped for, or maybe even expected, but currently nonexistent.

I don’t object to people working for free; what I object to is the spectacle of skilled writers willingly striking a deal with an avowed media company, with detectable revenue, that refuses to make even nominal cash compensation part of the deal. It’s entirely their business, but to me it seems like a pretty poor deal for the writer and a great deal for the company.

The idea of giving writers equity in a business is intriguing, and one to which I would give serious consideration. I am more ready than ever to join the cult of Jackson.

Tech startups generally reserve around 3 percent of a company’s equity for employees. I’d be a little more generous (I always thought that was a bit stingy of a percentage, especially since it means that employees would never get much of a voting interest as investors). And it wouldn’t be too difficult to budget — you can create an arbitrary number of shares, a time frame for profitability or sale based on your business model, and apportion shares per item, time spent, etc.

“Sweat equity,” if you will, and it not only salves the conscience of a publisher but gives contributors every incentive to promote and produce in order for a site to succeed — as well as some security that they’ll be heard in decisions affecting the business, since they’ll be shareholders as well.

Personally, I’m working on starting my own cult so that I can use the Huffington Post’s Health and Wellness section as a free publicity platform to sell my snakeoi…ahem “alternative medicine” and “spiritual awareness” products. Free high colonics for new converts! Who’s with me?

That is a good point to clarify. By “the rest of us,” I meant “the rest of us committed professionals or would-be professionals.” Obviously, not everybody publishing online is doing good enough work to warrant being paid for it. What I’m really worried about is the way that people who are capable of doing work at that level are being encouraged to trade their labor and time for intangibles such as “exposure” and “prestige,” which often enough amount to little more than fond notions.

How do you separate the professionals from the amateurs? Personally, I really don’t go in for pageview-based schemes, as they reward sensationalism and discourage long-form reporting. I actually think the oldest method is still the best: an editor’s subjective opinion of how much that particular writer’s work is worth to the publication.

Does there? If only the very best reporters are producing something worth paying for, why should the rest be compensated? That seems like saying, “lots of people write Star Trek fan fiction, but only a few can make a living off of it, so there needs to be a model for paying all of them.”

I’m playing devil’s advocate here — I have what I think is a response to that, but I’m interested to hear what other people think.

Yes, it’s true that nobody is forcing those writers to give their labor to HuffPo, but the fact that they are doing so lends credibility to an exploitative system at a sensitive time, when new business models for media are being worked out. The writers’ motivations don’t even matter: the point is that HuffPo sets a bad example. For me, this is the biggest reason not to write for them (apart from personal dislike of the site). Besides that, isn’t the HuffPo roster already more than a little too crowded for the promise of “visibility” to mean much anyway?

And I think the notion that a writer can strike out on his or her own, which both Magee and Batey suggest they do, is highly unrealistic. No matter how talented the writer is, an individual blog by a neophyte is extremely unlikely to attract very much traffic at all, let alone the kind of traffic that will sell ads at rates that will pay that person’s bills. From what I can tell, for most journalists starting out now, the personal blog is the functional equivalent of a combined resume and clips folder: you do work for free and for no readers, in order to eventually use it to get onto a site or a publication that offers either readers or pay; ideally both. (That’s how it has worked out for me.) Yes, some people will always be able to make an actual living off their own personal sites, but there needs to be a sustainable model for compensating the rest of us.

I’m an editor here, so maybe I should take a second to explain why I do so much work for the Rumpus for free: I believe strongly in the editorial mission, and there has never been much money in this kind of publishing anyway. What money there is, is being spent on obvious necessities (e.g. a full-time managing editor), and there’s not really even enough for that. In short, it’s a labor of love, and it’s not a real business. The latter can’t be said of the Huffington Post.