Good working culture, but a pedantic boss - Writer PSFK Employee Review

3.0
19 Jan 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

It's a great working environment with a young crowd of staff. Editors are helpful and provide good guidance to the writers. You learn a lot about trends and how to write to an online audience. It's also flexible working hours, so great for university students.

Cons

The founder of PSFK, Piers Fawkes is an overall nice guy and very involved with projects. However, it always feels like it's always his way or it's the wrong way. To him, a story can only be written in one perspective or it's not good enough to be published.

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PSFK Response
12y
The pay is incorrect and again, we don't have writers on staff so this must come from an intern. In terms of criticism of myself: What can I say? I am restless in the pursuit of excellence.

Explore other reviews about PSFK

5.0
24 Aug 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

nice co-workers, friendly environment, paid internship

Cons

could be very busy sometimes

2.0
13 Mar 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Young and vibrant office culture.

Cons

1. Low pay for the work you do ($5-6 per article). Which you are required to do in-depth research, source quotes, source photos (and resize them accordingly), incorporate SEO into the article, come up with a title that needs to be engaging but can only be written a certain way, create a tweet, write an excerpt that needs to be different to the headline (not repeating any of the words already used in the title), add tags, create shortened URL, and add categories. Oh, and you need to write 150-300 words for the article. The management team thinks this should take you 15-20 minutes. In the end, it usually took me an hour. 2. Piers Fawkes keeps changing the style guide of how things need to be written. However, instead of telling you that the style guide has changed, he will tell you that you've written something wrong. For example, a few of us got told off for using the word "smartphone" because one night he woke up and decided that "smartphone" is a stupid word, and requested us to edit the articles. 3. Piers and some of the senior editors have little respect for the writers. The way they address writing issues is to always talk down on the writers, although some of the employees probably have had more substantial writing experience than Piers and the Editor in Chief put together. That is why most great writers leave, and you're left with a bunch of interns.

3
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PSFK Response
12y
(We don't have writers on staff so this review must come from a freelance contributor or an intern, not an employee.) Some response: Firstly, we have never paid our US contributors a fee that low - The information about pay in this review is not correct. Secondly, we are restless in our pursuit of delivering the best product for our audience - and I think you can sense that from this review. Finally, we are built on the work of our contributors and we try our best to respect them - that said, I would argue the management team isn't supposed to be the made up of best writers or have the most writing experience, we're supposed to be the best ones to run the business. At the end of the day, we are a New York City based publication and we expect all our staff and contributors to deliver at the top of their game. When they don't meet our expectations, we're communicative about it. Hopefully we're respectful and constructive when we're critical - but we don't hand out trophies when staff don't achieve.
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