AN OPEN LETTER TO SAM SETHI
Please Note: This is an open letter to Sam Sethi, Founder and CEO of Blognation. I have elected to write this letter after having been one of the principal Blognation authors since August of this year. In all that time I have not received the pay promised …
Context & Ripple Effects
A principal Blognation author who joined in August says he has never received the pay Sam Sethi promised, taking the dispute straight to the public in an open letter — the format the corpus saw used against Forbes back in 2005. The same-day pickup by Guardian tech blog PDA under the headline "Is Blognation falling apart?" shows the story escaped the site's own orbit within hours.
The charge lands on the exact asset Sethi trades in: credibility. He is the ex-TechCrunch UK editor who was first to report the Google–Feedburner acquisition rumors in May 2007, and a blog network whose founders are publicly accused of stiffing writers cannot easily recruit sources or authors on that currency.
First-order effects
- Blognation's contributor bench faces an immediate work-or-walk decision: the letter converts private nonpayment into a public grievance that other authors can rally around or defect over.
- Sam Sethi's standing as a scoop-driven publisher — the man who broke word of Google's Feedburner acquisition talks in May 2007 — takes a direct hit while the network still depends on his name to attract writers and sources.
Second-order effects
- Mainstream tech outlets such as PDA begin covering Blognation's internals rather than its content, turning a payroll dispute into a recruiting and advertising problem for the site.
- Every other multi-author blog network comes under implicit pressure to prove contributors get paid, because the open letter has just been demonstrated as the working remedy when private chasing fails.
Third-order effects
- If ad-funded blog networks continue promising writers deferred or contingent pay, expect more payroll disputes to surface as public letters rather than quiet exits — pushing the model toward upfront payment terms or a collapse of contributor trust in networked blogging generally.
The trend: Multi-author blog networks that promise deferred payment to writers are turning payroll failure into public, reputation-first crises through the open-letter format.