Gateway Blend Reviews

* Pay is abysmal on the content team, no matter if you're an editor, a staff writer or a contractor. The salaries are insulting, especially if you bring a lot of experience. * Content drives Gateway's scheme, but leaders don't really care about the quality of the actual content. Content gets published with errors, inaccurate headlines, etc. There's no real editorial process. * Content basically is rehashed stuff from 5 years ago. You're stealing ideas and sometimes actual headlines every day. * If you love to write, you'll become bored. You'll basically do terrible slideshows until you die. Previously, there was a little room to be creative with intros, but now it's all terrible one-liners that are only there to sell ads. * Content leadership is nil. The current content lead has never been an editor and has no idea how to manage people or processes. And leadership does not care. * Higher leadership doesn't care about content as a "product," and their goals change frequently based on the direction of the wind. Nobody can tell you what the hell's going on. * Related to the previous point, there was a massive layoff in 2016, and for several weeks before it happened, leadership was nowhere to be found. * The content and website presentation is awful. Legitimately awful. If you care about your work, you probably will be embarrassed to put your byline on anything or to share items to your personal social media accounts. * Nobody can tell you how the company makes money, or even IF it's making money. The quarterly meetings don't help. * Chaos reigns. There is little to no strategy or alignment among the content, dev, ads and marketing teams. * There's not much room for promotion (if you manage to stick things out), and there's no offer of personal development (training, conferences, etc.). * Lots of interns take on the work of full-timers. Granted, the interns are paid, but they're still shouldering the burden of what should be a larger and more productive salaried staff. * You're forced to work with content management systems that were developed in-house that are incredibly wonky. These clearly were developed without writer/content manager input. They break often and simply don't do what you need them to do. It hampers your productivity in a big way.

The content team exclusively looks to Reddit for “stories,” which they copy and paste and call it “original work.” They advertise their content positions like you’ll be pitching and writing stories, but the position requires no creativity or brain power. If you want to be challenged in your career, you will get bored after a week. When they’re not copying and pasting Reddit posts into clickbait, you’re taking someone’s Reddit post and “rewriting it.” Aka making up details, embellishing and exploiting someone’s personal (often traumatic) story, all without their knowledge. Then, you take screenshots of Youtubers and use them to promote unrelated posts about subjects (like abusive relationships,) and just hope the person whose image we’re using just doesn’t find out. Many people in management positions have no experience producing content at a media outlet, and have no idea how to make actual, effective, clean content. If you pitch an idea to them, their response is, “that’s much too complicated, we want to spend as little time as possible on our content. Like, an hour, tops.” So you’re back to copying and pasting Reddit posts from five years ago. When we DO look to other, non-Reddit outlets for ideas, we usually just steal their article and sometimes even use their headlines word-for-word. They don't let you attribute information you get from other sites, because "we can't link out of our site, because we don't want people to click away!" Most of the interns turn down their full-time offers. If you’re desperate enough to go full-time, you can maybe last six months before losing too many brain cells.