Word: contention
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...growing collection of explicit material housed by the Harvard College Library (HCL). Encouraged by Harvard’s tendency to avoid academic and scholastic censorship, a surprising range of erotic art has appeared on campus in libraries, classes and student publications. Some of this art implements explicit content to achieve a higher social or artistic purpose, and some encourages us to enjoy the explicit for its own sake...
...though, Demand still needs humans - namely, writers, editors and video producers - to crank out content. That's where its horde of more than 7,000 freelancers comes in. One person earns a few cents for taking the algorithm's output and turning it into a headline. Another person writes the article, typically earning $3 to $15, depending on the specified length, and passes it on to a copy editor, who banks $3.50 for fact-checking and fiddling with grammar. All told, it may take less than a day, at a cost of less than $10, for a short article...
...result is a company that's able to produce profitable content on a scale that traditional news organizations can only envy. Demand estimates that it took in $200 million in revenue in 2009, enough to turn a profit. It helps that none but the company's most prolific content creators get health insurance or, for that matter, a minimum hourly wage. Critics have dubbed the company a digital sweatshop. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, has called Demand "demonic," and many writers prickle at the thought of being paid a few cents - rather than a few dollars...
...unfair criticism. The best way to make decent money through Demand, as I discovered, is to research and write at breakneck pace, and the result is content that only just squeaks through the system. Working as fast as possible, I could make close to $60 an hour at Demand, a nice improvement on what I'm paid for my day job, but I'd be producing articles that were thinly sourced and poorly written. (See 10 ways Twitter will change American business...
...much as Demand execs say they don't want to do journalism, they think they can offer it some help. The company envisions its how-tos running alongside stories in more traditional media, sharing revenue and reducing the need for news outlets to produce certain types of service-oriented content. "We're not saying we're going to save traditional media. That's arrogant," Rosenblatt says. "But we're definitely not going to kill...