What happens when you don’t pay writers who write for you? The pissed off writers write and not in a good way. This can harm any organizations image to a great extent and the bad PR might be irreparable. This is what happened to Blognation. As reported by TechCrunch the UK based company is in some hot water after US editor Oliver Starr posted a damning post with an open letter directed at Blognation owner Sam Sethi. The post was promptly removed from Blognation site but not before it was making rounds on the internet. Check out the TechCrunch post for a complete roundup. The letter can also be now seen on Starr’s website.

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 in my contract nor the reimbursement promised for expenses incurred on behalf of Blognation during this period. I am not alone. Every other Blognation author is in the same unsavory situation.

This open letter details in very broad strokes the reasons why I have lost faith in Sam. It makes specific statements as to the veracity of things Sam has said or written as well as things he has failed to do. I do not say these things lightly. Every statement made in this letter can be backed up with verifiable written material from email correspondence, Skype chats, or SMS messages.

The final paragraphs are obviously my opinion and do not necessarily reflect that of the other bloggers that are still members of the Blognation team. For a more detailed history of this sordid story, one includes a considerable amount of the actual Skype chat dialog as well as many paragraphs from dozens of email messages, please visit my new home on the blogosphere, owstarr.com (http://owstarr.com), my new email will be oliver@remove-this-first-owstarr.com

Lastly, this post is likely to be removed very shortly after I post it so please, make a screen capture, download it to an off-line reader, copy and paste it into a document or repost it on your own blog(really). At the end, this is a cautionary tale and the victims are the people that have worked for months on the content many of you have enjoyed but for which Sam Sethi has yet to (and may never) pay.

Oliver Starr

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