A potential recruit to the new Weblogs Inc., food blog Slashfood has posted a full copy of a contract she was offered to write for the site on a competing food blog “Food Blog ‘scool” after “recruiters” for the Jason Calacanis managed company (I believe Deidre Woollard) refused to discuss parts of the contract with her that precluded her from writing at other sites.
Kate Hopkins writes on the contract:
“[the] money wasn’t the reason I didn’t sign with Weblogs. The issues I had dealt with section 10 (Covenant Not to Compete) combined with section 11 (Acknowledgements). The contract could be easily interpretted that I could not involve myself with any other food and travel publications (not just web sites) until 6 months after we parted company. I felt very unomfortable with that…Add to that that posts on their sites means less time I can put on my own. I didn’t like that idea at all. So I passed on their offer.”
The contract, since removed from the site, reveals a lot of things previously not in the public sphere (although I’d note rumoured for a long time) such as pay rates and conditions.
According to the contract, writers for Slashfood are paid $500 USD per month and are expected to write “125 monthly blog posts, along with monitoring of comments, responding to readers in comments, and deleting offensive comments. Posts under the goal of 125 will be pro-rated at $4.00 per post”
The site also reveals Weblogs Inc’s recruiting tactics that should please bloggers who aren’t writing for the network but want to: Weblogs Inc “recruiters” email blogs currently blogging on topics that they’re looking to start up a blog on and ask them if they know anyone who might be interested in writing on the topic.
Update: I’ve posted this in response to some of the reaction on this one:
Time for a long cold shower on blogging pay rates
(thanks to Patrick Grote for the tip/ via Metafilter)
