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Apr 1 2008 8:42AM EDT

Gawker Writer in Revolt Over Pay Rate Cut

Felix Salmon isn't the only one obsessed with how much Gawker Media writers get paid. It turns out the writers themselves have a pretty healthy interest, too -- and at the moment, at least one of them -- Valleywag's Jordan Golson -- is a little cheesed off.

You see, as Felix has noted, the per-page-view bonus rate that each site in the Gawker empire pays out is reset each quarter to ensure that salaries don't go spiraling out of control. (One writer earned a monthly bonus of more than $12,000 in this year's first quarter.)

That's all well and good, and no more than Gawker employees signed on for. But with the second quarter now officially under way, they still haven't been told what the new pay rates will be. Hence Golson's mini-revolt, staged using one of Nick Denton's own megaphones:

We're working in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop, effectively being paid based on how many views we can drum up -- and now the goalposts are being moved mid-kick. This is unnerving and a slap in the face to the "creative underclass" that writes for Gawker's blogs.

If a potential advertiser asked Gawker to start running its ads and promised to negotiate terms later, they'd be laughed out of the room -- but that is exactly what the company is asking of its writers.

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