I know that I've probably bitched about this in here previously, but I'd run across a blog post by a newspaper guy who was strongly encouraging journalists to "stand together ... to reassert the stature of their profession", specifically in freelance and project work. As those of you who've been following along at home know, I've tried to get assorted writing assignments over the past year, and have been horrified to find how little quality writing is valued in the current market. Anyway, the combination of that blog post and my pent-up frustration with this all ended up in a somewhat more personal The Job Stalker post than is usually the case (not, of course, that it wasn't a useful post, as the guy I was talking about had put together a rather handy system for making a case for what one should be getting paid in those situations). I argue in the piece that these concepts are transferable to other project/freelance work situations (which seem to be "the future of work" according to some of the authors I've covered), but at heart, this is my railing against a market that's paying a dime on the dollar (or less) for professional writing services. As always, the half-cent generated by your clicky-clicky over there ====> is appreciated (even though I still have not been able to extract any sort of a report out of the Trib).I finally got nearly caught up on things tonight, at least clearing the jobs I had in my tab bar (I still have about 50 from the past week or so on a .txt file), and knocking down a couple of things that I've had hanging. I am a bit behind on getting back to folks on some e-mail things, but I'm no longer "six hours behind" ... albeit this coming at the cost of my missing a couple of networking events that I'd planned on attending this week. It also helps that Evanston Today has suspended doing the show "live" until they can work out the technical issues with LiveStream (we have not been able to access five of the last 10 shows we did in January ... they appear to be in the system, but we can't access them to get the embed codes). Instead of my having to spend 3-5pm every day at the computer whipping up links and other web stuff, I can more or less "at leisure" get those added to the video pages (heck, the last segment today didn't get up on the site until 8:30pm), which is a lot easier to be doing other stuff at the same time!