Do the HP Mavens Really Care About Their Contributors?

 One thing I learned from a bunch of power-mad, egotistical executive editors over 20 years as a reporter, is that there may be something lower than a staff writer, but God hasn't invented it yet.

And they will tell you that, right to your face as if they were conferring a morsel of wisdom that you can hold-to for the rest of your life. (In a way, they are). Reporters - in general - are slightly lower on the company tree than toilet cleaners. I mean, it's hard to get a reliable person to lower his or her face to within a foot of a smelly toilet bowl and wrestle a large floater into oblivion while slipping and sliding on Friday night's vomit. But staff writers? Ha! Two a penny. No, not good ones, but who cares? The copy editors are there to polish the prose, correct the punctuation and alter the point the writer was trying to make so radically it often reduces the poor jerk to tears and plotting homicidal revenge. And the managing editor and his acolytes hover in the background ready to authorize more cuts and changes. You don't like it, lowly scribe? get a better job - as a toilet cleaner, maybe.

Newspaper reporters are like bricklayers who throw up a wall while the master craftsmen get ready to level it, point the cement and claim the credit for the ultimate result. No wonder alcoholism and tooting is so prevalent amongst journalists; wanking and suicide, too, I wouldn't wonder.

Now I am starting to notice this holier than thou attitude amongst the powers that be at HP (and Google, too).

One example is their attack upon us for using photos they don't like lately. Wrong pixies, or whatever those things are, and watermarks. We keep getting all those polite but commanding messages to sort it before we can re-publish...you know? Don't tell me it's just me, pleeeze!

OK, I realize I have been less than circumcised, er, circumspect, about the pics I down-loaded to some of my articles. But I gave the photog credit (In most cases!). Not once has a picture author contacted me and asked for payment or for me to remove his work (which I would be happy to comply with).

Now. I don't even mind HP doing this, after all, just because the author has his pics posted everywhere on the search engines without specifying his terms of use in nearly every case, doesn't give us carte blanche to use them. And, yes, I realize there are free downloads, etc., etc. But why does Hubpage Control have to tell me, like I was a mere REPORTER, to look at three other hubs they post at the bottom of these electronic ephistles to give me a clue of what and how to prepare a hub article!? What about my nearly 250 articles herein; what about me constantly achieving 100; what about my 20 years as a reporter and columnist; what about the three books I have published? I'm just chopped liver, eh!?

Ah, me! delusions of grandeur again; I had thought I had found some masters who really cared about me, this humble but loyal wordsmith.

To hell with it, I'm off to clean the toilet.