Apparently, some mainstream journalists have a real attitude about writers who work for “content farms,” those companies that pay meager sums for the rapid production of vast amounts of internet content on every subject from how to fix a certain type of motor to the best way to make apple crisp.
It seems to me that this kind of writing is obviously not journalism and is really never portrayed that way, so they can't really say it's any of their business. But the idea is that if you accept twenty dollars to write a two hundred word article and they would normally get two hundred dollars or even two thousand dollars for an article of the same size, you're bringing the whole profession down.
Here's the thing. A two hundred word introductory article on how to perform some mundane task is in no way comparable to a real research article. Writers who write for content farms do three or four of those articles a day. Journalists might take a week or two to do a single article, including phone calls and interviews and fact-checking. Assuming they don't just base their whole story on someone's press release, which is a common practice.
The reality of today's economy is that there are not enough jobs. Not just enough jobs as a professional writer- enough jobs of any kind. For as long as that continues to be true, people are going to have to look for any kind of work that will help them stay alive until things get better, and no amount of indignant hand-wringing by journalists or anyone else is going to change that reality.