Establishing yourself: At first, we don’t know you or your writing. After hiring and working with hundreds of people (some at The Speaker, but more on other projects), it has become obvious that many hires are not serious. That is fine, but not something we can spend time on. If you are serious, though, this is of no concern to you either.
After we publish three of your articles, we will consider you at least possibly serious.
After we publish 10 good articles from you, we will consider you serious and will begin to invest in growing the audience for what you are writing about. Because we are taking on a bunch of writers at this stage, this might not be immediate, but it should be pretty fast. Within a few days or a week you should see us making some progress. We need something to show readers, though, so until we have 10 good articles, there is no point bringing them to see your news category.
(This goes for the whole site. We used to have a pretty good social media following, but we have restarted all our social media accounts. As soon as we have a healthy amount of new articles being published again, we will invest in building that audience pretty quickly. That is to say, the first weeks won’t compare with later on, when you will have many people reading your articles here. Your first articles are equally important, though, as they are the foundation of what we together will do.)
After you have worked for us for a month and have submitted a healthy body of writing, we will send you a press pass if you are doing in-person journalism, but you must request it from us because not everyone needs a press pass so we don’t issue them to everyone. We will send it to you, wherever you are, and we will pay for the pass and the postage. If you are working from home, you do not need a press pass. But if you are conducting a lot of interviews from home using email or social media, you can ask us to email you a digital press pass which you can in turn show to interview subjects. If you need a press pass right away for a serious undertaking, you can email us and we can discuss it.
Pay: You don’t know us either, so you can ask for your first payment anytime you want. You can ask after a day or after a few days or after a week. We will pay you to show you can trust us. We cannot pay often because it is time-consuming to make payments, and also there are often fees that go along with each payment. We will pay every month. But for your first month, you can ask us to pay you after two weeks. In other words, you can ask us to pay you after the first day, then after 2 weeks, but after that we add you to our payroll which will happen once per month, probably at the beginning of the month.
We prefer to pay by PayPal. This is what we are used to and have used for years. If you don’t have a PayPal account, please create one. If you cannot create one because of the country you live in, see if you have a relative or trusted friend in another country who we can send the payment to, and they can somehow get the money to you. If that is not possible, find the easiest and cheapest way for us to make payments to you. We are open to learning to transfer bitcoin or use other payment platforms, but only when absolutely necessary, as that takes a lot of extra work and cost, and we are already working a more-than-full schedule and are not receiving any profits from The Speaker (we are using funds from other things we have been working on for the past years, and currently are working on, to fund the writers, website, editors, etc., and do not ever expect to make profit ourselves, although we think The Speaker in it’s final form will be very attractive and will bring in some decent revenue, which we will first use to increase the salaries of the writers and staff, and then after that is taken care of, will accept profits if there are any — We are not doing this for money).