The Things I Thought and Did Not Say While Writing For a Content-Mill

In 1996, Jerry Maguire was laughed out of his office for publishing a company-wide memo encouraging his industry to take a more human approach. I’m not comparing myself to Jerry Maguire (if anyone wants to compare me to Jerry Maguire, my inbox is open), but after receiving a surprise termination notice from Collider last night, the website I have written for tirelessly over the last two years, I feel a little like him, packing his office up and heading out the door into a hopeful but uncertain future.

‘Jerry Maguire’ (1996) / Sony Pictures

I had been thinking about leaving for a long time, which is something I’m sure anyone will say to save face after losing a working opportunity. That’s fair, but Valnet, the parent company of Collider and the grim reaper of digital media, offered no opportunities. Valnet existed only to generate “content.” Content means clicks, means advertisements, means profit for Valnet. Certainly not for the writers, who are paid rates so poor that I have seen professional writers at more reputable publications drop their jaws when they hear them.

So I’m not sad to be done with them. I’m sad that I stayed around as long as I did in the first place. I’m sad that Collider made writing into a mechanical obligation, that sitting on my laptop and banging out 1,000 words about a work of art that means as much to me as Mulholland Drive could ever become a chore. You cannot keep up with your quota without the job starting to feel like you’re in the Severance office just sorting algorithms all day. But the work isn’t mysterious, or important. It is transparent and vapid.

I started at Collider in 2023. Still fresh out of college, the opportunity to write in a capacity that people would actually see was too exciting to pass up. I didn’t care about the money, because I saw this as a stepping stone. But the path forward did not change in the slightest during those two years. There was no room for growth unless you were willing to devote every single hour of your waking life to Valnet’s machinery.

There were some good experiences still, on a personal level. An achievement I will never live down is the fact that my favorite filmmaker, Michael Mann, shared an article I wrote about one of his films. I got to write about a lot of movies that had never been covered on the site, and I am glad that even a few dozen people might have seen those articles and sought out something new amidst the sea of comic book movie and Netflix original coverage. I am proud of the work I did there, but that is all in spite of what Collider wanted out of me, or any of their writers.

The disrespect of losing this kind of role with a single cold email from a faceless “People Ops” representative (whatever that means), checking Slack and our Content Management System to find that my accounts had already been deleted, it makes me angry. Because I gave them a lot of my time for very little in return, and it all led to a quick disposal, citing “need to reduce production and output,” in the same week that five new freelancers were added onto the team. Those new writers are probably making even less. I joined on at $30 per article, but I have heard some Valnet writers making as little as $15. To put it in perspective if you are not in this industry, IndieWire pays roughly ten times the rate that Collider offered me for a single 1,000-word piece. And when I was offered the illustrious “Senior Writer” position at Collider, it came with a whooping $4 pay increase per article, given that you could meet the 30-article-per-month quota. You didn’t read that wrong, 30 articles per month. If you did this, and only this, for a whole year, you would make $12,240 off of 360,000 words of published material.

Valnet owns and operates Collider along with Screen Rant, CBR, MovieWeb, Polygon, and a dozen other sites covering topics from auto-mechanics to housekeeping. They operate with a shotgun approach of hiring hundreds of freelancers at pennies on the dollar, making them grind out thousands of words a week, and letting them go when their quotas aren’t met. They are buying more sites each year, with the Polygon acquisition only happening this May. In addition to the lack of effort or care they put into curating a writing staff, they are gradually layering AI into the writing and publication process. Over my last six months there, our in-house Content Management System slowly added dozens of AI-driven features. Originally, they were just proofreaders. Then they could help find you good images to use with the article. Then they could generate ideas for subheadings, taglines, etc., and eventually, just in this last week before I was let go, we were encouraged to use a new AI tool that would essentially just tell us what to write in the bodies of our articles. I will not be surprised in the slightest if Valnet sites are regularly publishing fully AI-generated material by the end of the year, or if they cut human writers entirely out of the equation by the end of the decade.

I don’t feel like I am losing much here, but I do feel like the industry at large is becoming more and more like Valnet everyday, and that scares me.

I am not mourning this change just for me, but for people much further down the pipeline who have poured their lives into this work, and for those who may never get a chance. This year, Chicago’s two largest newspapers eliminated their full-time film critic positions. Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips held these roles, literally the ones that were once filled by Siskel and Ebert, and now they are replaced with… nothing. The job simply does not exist.

There are kids in college right now working toward English and digital media and journalism degrees who don’t even realize that the jobs they’re training for may not exist by the time they graduate. That is scary, and I don’t believe it is fearmongering because writers need to be scared right now. With print media in a gradual decay and digital media being encroached upon by AI and exploitative freelance practices and the elimination of anything resembling a full-time salaried career opportunity in this field, we are not going to be able to keep this work going if we aren’t scared enough to realize that things are bad and that we need to fight for them. A computer will never be able to do what a good journalist can do with a story. A computer cannot engage with a film or a record or a novel in a meaningful way. People are special because we can express ourselves creatively and think critically about the feelings that come out of these expressive acts. Nothing can ever replace that, and there will always be people in the world who know that these things are worth documenting, not only for posterity's sake, but for the present where good reporting and criticism and storytelling can shape the way people communicate with each other, even if that is just me writing a thousand words on why RoboCop is the Great American movie (which I will do whether I am paid or not).

I want to play a role in the community that continues fighting for journalism and criticism and the arts at large to matter in a world that pits profit and technology against human expression of thought, feeling, and story. Journalism is a public good, a service that has become far too intertwined with business interests that do not cover the bottom line. Writers deserve support, not just financial support but the kind of support that allows them to focus on what is important, not spending more time doing search engine optimization and brand tie-ins than the actual writing itself.

This isn’t going to be me making some big announcement about an initiative that I want to start. Because I am not sure what I will do in the next few months. But I know I want to keep writing, and I am excited to continue building a relationship with LEO Weekly, where I am covering new releases in a freelance role. I have promised in the past to use this platform more, and I did not keep those promises primarily because of the time and effort needed to keep up with Collider’s workload. I won’t make another promise now, but I do expect to spend more time here.

If you are a writer and you feel like you are in a similar place, we should talk. If you are a reader, the best thing you can do to keep this all going is to just keep reading. And I don’t mean my work particularly, I just mean anything. Every day, find some news or feature article or anything that remotely interests you, read it, share it with people if you feel so inclined. If you even read this far, you are doing a tremendous service for me and I cannot begin to express how much I appreciate that you are here.