Object Lesson

In Virginia Heffernan's NYTimes' column about technology, an article about content farms -- pseudo news-and-information sites that game the Google rating system by creating headlines and page names that include popular search items and then cobble up articles out of mostly nothing. People actually work at writing these non-articles, often about things they don't know about. Then this dreadful Object Lesson I must impart to my students:

"So who produces all this bulk jive? Business Insider, the business-news site, has provided a forum to a half dozen low-paid content farmers, especially several who work at AOL's enormous Seed and Patch ventures. They describe exhausting and sometimes exploitative writing conditions. Oliver Miller, a journalist with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence who once believed he'd write the Great American Novel, told me AOL paid him about $28,000 for writing 300,000 words about television, all based on fragments of shows he'd never seen, filed in half-hour intervals, on a graveyard shift that ran from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 in the morning."

If one were simply slaving in the salt mines of the Net, that would be one thing. But with an MFA! From Sarah Lawrence! Too grievous to contemplate.