Attribution becoming a real pain at Demand Studios

Attribution has become quite the buzzword at Demand Studios these days. Seems the people behind the company have forgotten that they're paying writers $15 for most stories. If they want heavily sourced stories with proper attribution, they should be increasing their paltry rates.

Does anyone think that will happen? Nope, Demand Studios will continue asking writers to source stories as if we were writing for the New York Times. Hate to break it to you, but the Times pays a lot more than $15 a story.

Demand Studios has benefited from the crummy economy and the woes of newspapers and magazine publishers. Writers who never would have considered writing $15 stories are flocking to the site because they are running out of other options. Simply put, too many magazines and newspapers have shut down or closed off their freelance budgets. Demand Studios is there, eager to take in desperate writers.

Personally, rewrite requests at Demand are driving me crazy. Where are the copy editors who realize that we're all getting paid horrible rates? Why do I keep getting those who think we're writing for some higher good? We're churning out garbage stories for eHow, a site that serves as a depository for some of the most poorly written junk on the Internet. Increasing the quality of the writing on the site is a noble goal. But paying writers $15 a story to do this smacks of a company taking advantage of people desperate to pay their bills.