COYOTE Calendar: September 10-September 16
This week we've got pruning, taxidermy, corn, cardboard, making U2 mad, and more.
Power
Yap Zone: The AI Slopocalypse Comes for COYOTE
AI, in our pitch form? It's more likely than you think.
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Hey there and welcome to the Yap Zone, our biweekly (that means every other week) newsletter where COYOTE gives you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our newsroom and a rundown of our team's picks for music, food, events, and lots more. This newsletter is an exclusive offering and extra dose of gratitude for our Yapper- and Howler-tier members. Thank you, and we hope you enjoy!
In case you haven't heard, it's rough out here for journalists. While unethical and deeply untalented writers climb the ranks and newsrooms pivot to AI-generated content, more and more hard-working reporters are being let go. The statistics are soul-crushing: more than 1 in 10 reporters and editors has been laid off in the last three years.
When we were planning COYOTE, we knew we wanted to be a place for freelance writers to pitch the stories they couldn't do elsewhere. The alt-weeklies that serve as our guiding light were so often incubators and supporters of freelance talent. And most of us at COYOTE are freelancing alongside working here as we build our business up. We want to be good to freelancers because we're freelancers ourselves, too.
Before launch, we spent time carefully crafting our freelancer policies, discussing fair rates and practices, and debating our pipeline for how to evaluate and edit work that came in. We designed a pitch form, so that even people who didn't have a personal connection to someone in COYOTE could send us their ideas. And boy did they!
At first, I was stoked to see so many pitches roll into the form. Then I started reading them.