[monkeyshine]

make it illegal for contractors who reside in California to create more than 35 pieces of content in a year for a single company, unless the outlet hires them as an employee.

Sounds unconstitutional on many grounds. And immoral, and unamerican.

I presume this refers to submissions written under hire, and not submissions written freelance and sold on spec but who knows.

[17th Miss Regt]

make it illegal for contractors who reside in California to create more than 35 pieces of content in a year for a single company, unless the outlet hires them as an employee.

Here is an idea. Create an entity "SInc" with two dozen or so separate subsidiaries. Call them S1 through S24. Writer A submits each article he writes to his target company and also to S1. Then the article is no longer for a single company. After Writer A has submitted 35 articles to S1, he submits his next 35 articles to S2, then the next 35 articles to S3, and so on. In the meantime, his original target company has accepted, say, 270 articles during the year, none of which were written solely for that company. And by the way, SInc does no publishing but does have a designated reader to read the articles.

[tbw2]

The funny side effect - these publications have said you’re welcome to submit content ... we’ll publish for free.

I expect to see an explosion in official sponsored content and professionals providing interviews / free content in exchange for a mention of their business.

[RainMan]

The elephant in the room that has not weighed in on this yet are Tech contractors. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon all have contingent workforces that are often equal in size to their direct staff. I know … I am one. If I were limited to producing only 25 deliverables for a customer, I know some customers that I could only work for about 1 month/year. If this is applied to tech contractors, imagine massive wailing and gnashing of teeth from Big Tech.