New Mediabistro editor (and Gawker alum) Elizabeth Spiers gets a gold medal for bravery this week, for delving into the dark underworld of Mediabistro's freelancer bulletin boards. When a user asks about Mediabistro's payment policy for essay writers (the policy being no payment), things get catty. Some highlights from the angry and impoverished freelancers:

·User 1: For a site that is supposedly for members of the media, I find it sad and even irritating that they expect writers to donate their services. If they manage to pay the staff and the company hosting the site and the landlord for their office space and the electric company and so on, why should writers provide for nothing that which actually helps draw people to the site, which in turn allows them to charge for advertising? And even the idea of in-kind compensation is something that the writer has to know to ask for? Even while Laurel is quoted by a reporter about this being a money making machine?

·User 2: Newbie writers are essentially like illegal immigrants, or mine workers in pre-union times, or underage children in third world sweatshops. It's fair to exploit them because they are willing to be exploited.

Spiers joins in for more bitch-fighting after the jump.

·Spiers says: I was a Wall Street person before I was a media person, and to me these things are pretty straightforward economic issues. If what we're supplying isn't sufficient to meet what you're demanding, then obviously, you're not buying. Which is fine. Other people are. I don't walk by a Mercedes dealership and complain that the prices are exploitative; I just don't buy it.

·User 3: [...]clam up the loquacious Laurel. The more she brags about being profitable, the more screwed and putoff her writers — and for that matters her readers, her AG members, etc. — are going to feel.

·User 4: Well, children have such small and nimble fingers, so much easier for banging out prose on the key boards. You really don't have to pay them anything because they're so trusting, and believe whatever the nice lady with a background in finance has to tell them. Do you like milk and cookies?

Yeouch. We're sending the MB offices some warm beer until this passes. STAY STRONG, ELIZABETH.
Writing For Mediabistro [Mediabistro BB]