I had considered this at first, but came to a different conclusion after a little consideration. My concern is honestly with the pay.
There is no way as a writer, I could generate a 300-word story on a Permicultural Topic in what amounts to an hour of pay. I realize 300 words is not much, but I could not write a 300-page article in a hours’ time, much less edit it
enough for submission, fact-check my own writing, take photos, and then send it in to you in sixty minutes time. And that is suggesting $20 per hour is adequate for intellectual work. For freelance writing, the going rate is more like $40 per hour.
Now I confess, I could do all that before lunch, but that is at least four hours of work, and so that is pretty simple math; about $5 per hour.
Now granted a person could throw together an article, find some previously taken photos, and do some spot-checking of facts, in an hour perhaps, but this gets into some deeper problems; hidden costs and quality. At some point, I have taken those photos, so for someone to use them, I
should have fair compensation. In short, it takes time to set up a good photo. Maybe not an hour per photo, but time for sure. And that relates to quality to, because do you really want a hastily thrown together permicultural article that has photos that kind-of-fit the situation, just because it was a hastily put together article?
I realize that I spend far more than an hour on Permies, and I post photos all the time, and none of that is monetarily compensated, but it is my
gift to people maybe do not have 45 years of farming and homesteading
experience. My posts are also full of spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes, and photos are ones I have kicking around on my computer. In short, there is no expectation of quality writing for a forum reply.
I do not think your intention was malicious, but the suggestion of $20 is a pretty good slap in the face to writers on here. When the expectation is for professional writing skills, it really should be properly compensated. In the working world, that is known as “a living wage”, but goodness, even if an article took only two hours to come up with, the cited pay is still $2 under minimum wage.
As writers, we have to watch out for this sort of situation otherwise we will be wordsmithing for not.