It's hard to believe that just two short months ago, Seed went online and invited all of you to join AOL's community of writers and photographers.
Since then, we've purchased about 1,000 articles and photo galleries -- or, about 125 pieces per week. And, we've already published about half of the more timely, news-oriented pieces. Our editorial team will publish the other half -- items tied to future events or perennial interests -- in coming weeks and months.
With every purchase, however, we've rejected about 10 submissions. This isn't a reflection of the quality of your work. Rather, it's because of the way our first assignments were set up -- where many people contribute to each project. We were happily surprised to receive the high level of interest and participation so quickly after launching Seed in beta mode. Yet, as writers ourselves, we know it's frustrating to feel like you're competing with countless others to get your work published.
As Saul, our programming director, pointed out, our
collaboration to cover the South By Southwest music festival with AOL's music site
Spinner.com shows what we think will be a better way for most Seed projects to work: In most cases, we'll assign projects to a single writer or photographer. Sometimes we'll post an open call asking for people to volunteer for certain projects. In others, we'll reach out to Seed writers we've worked with before, offering projects that suit their strengths. We're going to make it easier for editors and creators to work more directly with each other.
This is how we operate with our current freelance network of journalists, and so by extension this is how we plan to work with you. You have been following through in good faith on our assignments; the onus is now on us to set you up with assignments in a way that will help you succeed.
Some of you may have seen a few assignments in our listings that were meant for one particular creator -- our initial experiments with using Seed this way. Those distractions will go away, as we have developed a new way to keep private assignments out of public view. But know that these opportunities are not for some select few. The more we get to know your writing style and expertise, the more we will reach out to you with great projects.
We're also working with our editors to integrate more one-to-one assignments and set shorter assignment due dates, so that we can start connecting editors and creators for shorter-term, customized, timely projects. Sort of a 'less is more' approach -- less 'competition' for more timely assignments. Building the functionality to allow for this seamless and more frequent communication will take some time so until then, we'll rely more on email communication and call-for-participation posts, similar to how the Spinner SXSW project is set up.
This is an exciting time for Seed -- exploratory, heady, consuming. And we're happy you've joined us at the ground level for this great experiment that is just now starting to reflect our true vision. It takes a special breed to jump in with us during the early stages. By default, you have become our focus group, our ground-level influencers, our power-users. We're relying on you, and you're offering terrific feedback that we're incorporating into new enhancements. But, as you're probably aware, rolling out new features takes time, so we thank you in advance for your patience.
As always, if you have any questions or additional feedback during this time, keep it coming. Simply reply in the comments section of this post, or email us at
contact@seed.com.
