Greg Hartnett

Earlier this week, we decided to take one of our projects a new route. For the last eight months, we have employed approximately 65 freelance authors to create content on a daily basis. The management of the authors turned into almost a full-time job, and the revenue stream simply did not justify the expense of the content. As such, we decided to make the blogs aggregators of best-of-class material, using technology to capture and display articles from leaders of industry.

Unfortunately, the task of cutting the troops loose fell on my shoulders. Firing people is definitely my least favorite part of being the boss, but the chore needed to be done nonetheless. So, Wednesday morning, I sent off the following group email:

Hello Bloggers:

This marks my final correspondence to you as a group. We have decided to take the blogs a different route, and author participation will no longer be required.

BOTW has always been more of a technology company than a content company, and in an effort to move the BOTW Media project in line with our other efforts, we have decided to change the blogs to aggregate best of class material from third-party sources. As such, we will no longer need our own authors.

We will calculate posts for each author, and send out final checks within the next week. I do thank each and every one of you for your participation - I truly enjoyed creating some interesting material, and it was a pleasure working with this group.

If you have any questions, or if there is anything that I can do for you in your future endeavors, please do not hesitate in contacting me.

I know that this email came out of the blue for most of the authors. Additionally, I am aware that more than a handful of the people involved were pretty happy about the gig, and would probably disappointed by this news. I received replies from a couple dozen of the authors, mostly expressing surprise, and wishing us good luck in the future. However, one email struck me as ill-thought:

I have to say that e-mail came out of nowhere gentlemen, although when I saw what was going on with the movie blog yesterday, I imagined something was up. This is extremely disappointing news as a second source of income and a place to call my sports writing home, considering that just a couple of weeks ago I thought I was going to be taking on a larger role. That makes this doubly disappointing. Are you trading content for advertising? A little forewarning would have been nice, but I’d be naïve to think that would be appropriate in today’s cynical business world, and haphazard and fading Internet advertising community. I’d be interested in any meaningful side work that may become available, and I don’t mean being paid nickels to write the same bloated descriptions of movie sites. Thanks, I suppose, for the opportunity.

Compare that email with the following:

Thanks for letting us know, Greg. It’s been fun.

I was actually kind of surprised BOTW hadn’t been doing the RSS-feed-to-blog thing earlier. I’ve been thinking of using something similar in my own blog to supplement my articles, and I managed to cobble a script together from spare parts a while back. Maybe I should dig that thing up… it’s a great way to automatically add content.

I just grabbed copies of all the articles I’d written for BOTW and saved them for my own personal “clips” file. I won’t re-post them anywhere, as they belong to BOTW now. However, if you ever take those articles offline and no longer need them, please let me know so I might use them elsewhere.

Thanks again for the opportunity. Good luck with all your endeavors with BOTW.

Should we need writers in the future, who do you think we will decide to reach out to?

Writing when angry is never advised. Any fool can lash out - and most fools do. Nothing good can ever come out of writing in anger. Next time you are angry and want to vent, write what you want to say, save it, and come back to it 24 hours later. Have a look at what you wrote. Now that you have a clearer state of mind, do you still want to send that letter? I’d bet not.