If You Don't Get Paid For It, It Has No Value

Marginal Utility's Rob Horning has a pointed assessment of the volunteer economy of internet print publications. He rightly scorns the elitist hierarchies of lifers in a cozy enough position to warrant a paycheck (ie, not me), but also fairly interprets the exchange value of unpaid labor as a functionality of capitalist enterprise (resume building, social worth, writer name-branding) that, in the process, devalues the monetary legitimacy of criticism in general. Kinda depressing, as noted in the comments section by EDM from Providence, RI:

"Laboring for the love of it is a laudable sentiment. It has a kind of Fourierist ring to it. But whereas someone under Fourierist socialism would theoretically enjoy a material return as an added boon to the already felicitous return of joy gotten from labor, someone under the conditions you describe appears merely to cherish a very evanescent form of capital, i. e., “brand identity,” as the fruits of her labor.

Just goes to show you how the noblest aspirations, when ground through capitalism’s satanic mills, become the basest strategems"

The points argued in the article seem to further the case, as Felix Salmon and the New York Times's David Swensen and Michael Schmidt have recently argued, for non-profit newspapers (and thereby nonprofit critics). This, of course, comes with it's own set of problems (not the least of which being a prevention of the hierarchies discussed in Horning's article and an overemphasis in endowment worth on what Salmon referred to as the "genuinely important newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post" ), but this seems to be a valuable alternative to explore, particularly considering what a vital function newspaper in a functioning democracy.