Fantastic article! And do true


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Very entertaining and true. Now, I feel guilty that I didn't pay anything to read it.

Interesting article.

It has always been tough to have a profession that is so 'fun' that people are willing to do it for free.  Sports, photography, writing, music.. these are all things people do in their spare time as hobbies.  It's not too surprising you'll find people willing to do these things for free.  When you finally get tired of doing it for free, it's pretty hard to convince everyone they should pay - especially when they are tons of other people still eagerly and happily doing it for free.

Excellent reading! Thanks for posting.

On a slightly different tangent, but also illustrating the value of 'for free', I recently had no further need of a small dining table I owned. The table was of good quality and in excellent condition so I was loathe to simply take it to the dump. I decided therefore to offer it for free on my local 'Freecycle' website, so that folk in need of such a table could contact me via email and arrange to collect it for free.

What a pain in the ass it turned out to be. Blunt messages like "is it still there" with no 'please', 'thank you', punctuation or the courtesy of a name started to drip-feed into my In-box. One reasonably polite lady requested a full description and then turned it down because she was "holding out for a different colour". I was eventually contacted by a girl called April who said she could collect it that same evening. When I agreed I later got a call from her boyfriend who asked instead if he could collect the following day. I was going to be out but made arrangements for the table to be outside available to him. He didn't turn up.

I finally did get the table collected, after having lots of contact with people who I'd rather not have contact with, but next time ... it'll be going straight down to the dump.

I read the article for free.

Gosh, it's so much easier here - even out in the boonies we have two charity shops in our small town, and every other town has at least one, often several. One (maybe both) will come and collect bigger stuff.

When we have stuff like that, we are able to just put it on the curb with a sign that says "free" and there are people who patrol the neighborhoods around here for stuff who pick it up and take it away.  I've never had anything decent sit out there for more than 2 days.  They're welcome to it. 

We don't even need a sign in my neighborhood...there are a few people who drive around in pickup trucks every trash night looking for stuff. I had a yard sale once and dragged everything that didn't sell out to the curb for trash pickup, and 1/2 hour later when I went to walk my dogs 90% of it was gone. I couldn't even imagine how they knew the stuff was there so quickly.

I was a member of one the freecycle groups while living  in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Most of the members were takers and 5% were givers. I finally quit, when posts looking for free.late model cars and flat screen tv's started showing up.

The Salvation Army here is very picky too, even though one use for the furniture they're given is to give to families who've had e.g. a fire or a flood in the very short term while they're waiting for their insurance to come through and their new stuff to arrive.
Also here most won't take older upholstered furniture / beds because it won't be up to fire safety standards. That said, the local church, which is only 5 mins walk from my house has a shop which seems to take just about anything. When I asked what they would take, the lady said they'd had skis handed in and they'd sold within a week.
I'm sure I've posted this before, but when we had to clear the loft for thicker lagging, I took loads of unused wedding presents to the shops, and one day I was walking with two big carrier bags and a woman I'd never seen before looked at the bags, smiled and said, "Wedding presents!" I had to laugh.
(At the time we got married, we took a lot of presents we knew we'd we'd never use to an Oxfam shop about 75 miles away in the hope that none of the kind givers would see them, and if they did, they wouldn't associate them with us.)

What about Habitat for Humanity? I think you have to drop stuff off though.

Our local Habitat for Humanity will pick up things. I donated quite a bit to them a year ago, when we downsized. They came and got it all. Nice people and a good cause.

I now use nothing but Craigslist now or just leave it out at the curb. Most things disappear within the day

Interesting article.

It has always been tough to have a profession that is so 'fun' that people are willing to do it for free.  Sports, photography, writing, music.. these are all things people do in their spare time as hobbies.  It's not too surprising you'll find people willing to do these things for free.  When you finally get tired of doing it for free, it's pretty hard to convince everyone they should pay - especially when they are tons of other people still eagerly and happily doing it for free.

Will work for credentials comes to mind. I work for publications and websites, but it's not much better paying than that. Some people are clearly freelance, which isn't allowed, but they get some editor or publication willing to support them. The bottom line on sports is this. There are too many people covering, even the ones who are dedicated to one publication, and not as much demand as an outside view might imagine.

In any area of entertainment like this. And sports is entertainment just like a show or any other performance. There's an event, there might be one or two photos needed for coverage. The big publications have their people or their stock sources. What's left? (I'll help... Not Much!)

Deadline for sports can be a matter of who runs faster into the building and uploads to the website. Quick crop maybe, but find the right shots, 2 or 3, garb ftp and upload to the publication.

Then there's the demand part beyond immediate coverage. Sports becomes stale in an hour, by the next day, it's old news.

So you hit the other part right too. You need to love what you are doing.

Media requires a meeting before the event, often hours before it starts. You do not get to spectate, and most of the time, don't see the event at all, because you are looking through the viewfinder, running somewhere to catch something, chimping, working on the computer.

I love what I do, and it's a break from working safety team. I find it odd that what I do for relaxation, in this case photo and news, is often harder work than what I do for pay, at the same events. 

I've played music for free, in fact, for the Salvation Army fundraising, VFW and at VA Hospital. I don't mind that. But if someone said, come play our wedding or at a bar for free, I'd be very hesitant to accept the invitation to work for free.

I will work photo for charity events for free also, and did for years. It's a good cause. But I won't work for some profit or commercial event, for "exposure" and that's the last part.

Flicker where there are thousands of people, trying to be discovered and giving away photos for exposure. Great humor watching them imagining they will some day be famous, because of their great works, that they gave away for free.

Working for nothing just encourages the cheapskates to expect to find someone else who will work for free, and it kills the market for people who are working for income and the long term.

Good article. Thank God for web ads and the NYT, I got to read it for free. But someone is actually paying for it. Almost nothing is actually "FREE" on the Internet. There are usually some strings attached somewhere.