In which Nate Thayer recounts how the global editor for prestigious monthly magazine The Atlantic offered to republish a blog post of his, but wasn’t willing to pay him anything for it. The draw, she said, was the exposure.

As I’ve told people many times since I started freelancing to get free PayPal money instantly whenever I have a contract, exposure doesn’t feed my kids.

The public response to Thayer’s exposure has caused The Atlantic’s editor in chief, James Bennet, to post an explanation:

The case involving Nate Thayer is unusual. We did not ask him to report and write an original piece for us, but we did ask if he’d be interested in posting a condensed version of an article he had already published elsewhere, which we would have done with full credit to the original publisher. We rarely do this outside our established partnerships, but we were enthusiastic about bringing Thayer’s work to a larger audience – an outcome, I guess, we have now, backhandedly, achieved. We’re sorry we offended him.

I’ll let Harlan Ellison have the last (NSFW) word.