Since interest in this website has picked up over the last few weeks, I’ve had more than one person suggest I could boost our list of contributors by asking some of them to write for free.

Many of the people telling me this are writers.

After hearing this from several writers, I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion: you’re all high.

At a minimum, you provide clues about why English majors shouldn’t run major industries.

I love y’all, don’t get me wrong. But this not paying writers bullshit is killing us. KILLING. US.

Whenever I see someone offering up an “unpaid” writing internship, it makes me want to throw things.

Companies, if you’re going to make us compete with unpaid college interns you are going to destroy journalism. If you’re a journalism company and you’re doing this, just cut to the chase and outsource this crap to Pakistan. Let us all grow up to be the illiterate hillbillies we’ve all secretly longed to be.

When companies offer up unpaid internships they are, in fact, saying good writing has no value. The void is like a black hole sucking in everything else around it. The going rate for a blog post these days is $20 to $25 per post. You can make that much working at McDonalds. We got college debt, son.

Between the unpaid internships and the tendency of websites to aggregate links instead of producing original content, I don’t know how much longer we can last. I feel like one day we’re all going to wake up and realize no one’s been writing anything new for 10 years. We’ll just get all of our information from government websites and PR flacks.

It can’t go on like this, folks.

You don’t think writing is worth money?

Get on Twitter right now and see all the dumb shit your kids are posting. Then act like it doesn’t matter.

It sure does.

That’s why I will never, ever, ask these people to write for free. Even if they receive only a token something, it will always be SOMETHING. It will never be nothing.

We don’t play that around here.  I’m not going to contribute to our destruction.

As long as I have anything to do with this website, we will stand for something. One of those somethings is paying people for their work.

What a radical concept.