Thursday, September 19, 2013

The Year Without Pants- thoughts on writing from home

Reposted from GalleyCat;

In his new book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work, author Scott Berkun outlined what he learned while working as a manager at the major blog company.
On today’s Morning Media Menu, Berkun shared insights that can help editors, publishers and writers cope with the rapidly changing digital workplace. Press play below to listen, but here’s an excerpt:
Working remotely at all is considered taboo at some companies, but I think that is foolish. It should all be focused on the results instead of these superficial characteristics. If someone can work well remotely, then where they are in the world shouldn’t really matter that much. It should be focused on their output and their results.

Berkun continued:
Everyone at WordPress.com works remotely or works from home, which means there are no office hours, no set place to go to work. One of the big discoveries in the book is about co-working and finding places where other independent workers are working. There are social benefits that come from being in a room with other people who are working. Even if you are not working on the same thing. Wise managers or employers should be open-minded about allowing their employees to experiment and try co-working spaces.

Weinstein is sick of the negative attitudes about Generation Y


An excerpt from Adam Weinstein's essay in Gawker this month. Over 700,000 views;


I once listened to a professor, who is in his sixties, read us the first published piece he’d been paid for, in the late 1970s. A thousand words or so. The rate, he says, was something like two bucks a word. That’s four times what the Village Voice pays today, even for an award-winning investigative cover story. It’s geometrically greater than what most writers can earn today writing daily brilliance for nationally renowned publications online. And writing daily brilliance, which many of them do, is hard goddamned work. If I had a dollar for every older writer or editor who confided to me that “I don’t know how young writers do it today; I certainly couldn’t,” I could buy every property that publishes them. So no, we shan’t be doing as well as our parents, and no, we shan’t be shutting up about it.