In breaking news, Digital City, aol's nation-wide urban information network, has packed it in in the San Francisco Bay area. In a twenty-four hour period, Digital City's San Jose locale went from "being amalgamated into the SF office," to dismantled entirely, along with the SF office!
In an experimental venture, this reporter contracted with aol's Digital City in October of 2002. However, aol's untoward delay in returning signed contracts to her, resulted in only two items being submitted-in December of 2002.
On January 8, 2003, I checked in with the editor,Timmi, to touch base and request again the payment owed. The response was semi-confusion, but he appeared to genuinely want to resolve the issue. Subsequent emails spelled out the E-N-D was near.
In a message dated 1/8/2003 11:45:23 PM Pacific Standard Time, jill@jilleliz.com writes:
Hi Timmi:
Just checking in- haven't heard anything from you since before NY Eve.
Any work for me?
Any $ for me?
Thanks-
jill,
sorry i haven't gotten back to you sooner.
a lot has changed over the holidays and unfortunately, aol has put a freeze
on using freelancers for the time-being.
Digital City is still going to exist, but we've been forced to do a lot more writing ourselves.
this will hopefully change soon but for now, there's nothing i can do about it.
regarding getting paid-send me an invoice of the stuff you did and i will make sure you will be compensated.
i really appreciate your contributions and please stay in touch and check in with me at least once a month to see if anything changes.
thanks
tim
San Jose Editor
aol Digital City
333 Bush St., 22nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: 415.844.9199
hello there,
Just wanted to let you know that as of 7a.m. this morning, the San Jose page ceased to exist.
aol, as you probably know, has been going through a lot of turmoil of late and so we just got word yesterday afternoon from national that they were
shutting down several cities around the U.S.
San Jose and Sacramento have been both tucked into what is now called theSan Francisco Bay Area.
i realize that you may have already been notified by individual category
editors you've been working with that aol has cut back on freelance writers
but unfortunately this is the next step -- there is no page to search
because it no longer exists.
however, i am told that all events are searchable, so if you need to find
anything you've written on the site, you should be able to locate it.
i would highly recommend that if you have outstanding invoices to please
send them to me and/or John Gaines (jgaines848@aol.com), the
managing editor, as soon as you can. the reason i say this is that i really don't know
how much time i have left here but for the forseeable future (the next week),
i'm still working here...so it would be in your best interest to get
them to me so i can make sure they're passed on to John.
for now, i will be mapping over a lot of the events and venue write-ups to the
expanded San Francisco site.
if you have any questions, feel free to call me (415.844.9199)
or contact john.
thanks so much for your help and contributions.
i was originally under the impression that the Bay Area cities wouldn't be
affected but obviously that was incorrect.
i'm sorry it's ending so abruptly but that's the nature of these things i guess.
best of luck,
tim
just want to be fair- thought it was $50 each for some reason....
if not well, I
would just like it to be taken care of, rather than "lost" in the shuffle.
Do you still have a job?
hey, the san francisco office is being shut down.
today is the last day for all of us.
please direct payment inquiries to john gaines.
you can try for more money
but no, the write-ups have never been $5 each, even back in aol's heyday
when they paid tons of cash out.
jgaines848@aol.com
sorry. i don't have much time.
thanks for your help.
tim
These emails are self-explanatory. I found the tone of his last email to be very unsettling- as if they had "x" amount of time to get out or else.
There have been some developments since the doors closed and email addresses were summarily cut off:
The "John Gaines" Timmi referred to, to get paid,
has also been let go and his email is not working. NOTE: This was later resolved satisfactorily.
Information received from other Digital City writers across America, shows that the shut downs began in the West,
and are slowly making their way across the country.
Sites, for example in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, are still viable operations.
The point to stress here is that this is not some poor little company, that has fallen on bad times due to the economy! aol-TimeWarner is a giant in the industry- one of a small number of mega-conglomerates- it is highly doubtful that my $50 or $100 is going to bring them down....
For more on the shoddy business practices that are in the former aol-Time-Warner's bag of tricks, see: aol-TimeWarner: All Rights or Nothing!"