“Writing is work, and that work deserves payment in Our Capitalist Society. So we just thought, “Yeah, let’s pay everybody,” and if it failed, it failed. People seemed really happy that we were up front [about our budget]. Sometimes people would take their pieces elsewhere, and that’s wonderful. I think everyone should be getting as much money as they possibly can. But a lot of people appreciated that we were just making a gesture, even if it was $25 or $50. It’s not nothing, and that was our goal: to offer people not nothing.”

If you were to toddle over to Digiday, you would see an interview with a woman who possesses some opinions about disruption and writing in these modern times.

“So what is media or news disruption, then?”

“Somebody made a super-good point about what disruption wasn’t, which was to start your job at a huge media concern, and then spin off your own blog under that umbrella or get a ton of VC funding. Anyone who’s starting their own project, like Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt starting Hood Feminism with their own money, on their own time, without anybody overseeing them — that, to me, looks more like disruption than “The New York Times gave me a lot of money to make this.”

That said, if the New York Times would like to give me a lot of money, I am composed primarily of ears.