AOL hired an army of underemployed music lovers to interview bands at South by Southwest. But the citizen journalists, paid $50 per story, are missing their deadlines, so AOL sent a panicked mass email (below). AOL’s Seed division is trying to interview every single one of the 2,000 bands performing at SXSW via its computer-dispatched army of freelancers. At a company where stories are routinely assigned based on internet statistics, that’s a refreshingly human assignment — “Almost Famous 2.0” is how Brian Ries summed things up in his Daily Beast article on Seed’s coverage of the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin . But humans have a way of gumming up the machine, and Seed editors have issued an “Urgent call for assignments,” shown below. “Urgent” indeed: AOL forgot to Bcc its contributors, exposing their emails, and also told people they could skip the pictures and bios. So much for humanizing the borg. [ Photo via Getty Images ]
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Deadline Panic at AOL Over Hipster Contributors [Internal Memos]
