A group of People magazine writers represented by the Newspaper Guild of New York have won an arbitration ruling upholding a 2007 agreement with Time Inc. that allowed all writing for magazine Web sites to be voluntary, Mediaweek reported yesterday.

According to the report, the 2007 agreement between the guild and the magazine publisher said writers would not be forced to write for sites like People.com, and if they did their workload would be “adjusted accordingly.” People writers in the Los Angeles bureau felt their superiors were in violation of the agreement, and arbitrators agreed, although they did not award back pay to the writers who put in extra time on the site.

It seems silly, at a time when print and online coverage seem like one and the same for so many magazines and newspapers, to argue over whether writing for the Web is part of what a writer is getting paid to do. But we applaud the guild for standing up for writers’ rights to get paid for the work they put in, because so many writers today are paid so little (especially when they work on the Web) but go above and beyond without even thinking of asking for additional wages.

People.com Guild Employees Claim Win in Labor Case –Mediaweek

Related: Pay The Writer? Now With This Technology!

GalleyCat: The organizers of the Thurber Prize for American Humor couldn’t narrow their short list down to the usual three candidates — so this year there are four authors competing for the $5,000 prize: Sloane Crosley, Ian Frazier, Don Lee and Laurie Notaro.

FishbowlDC: FBDC’s founding editor Garrett Graff has been named editor of Washingtonian.

Observer: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has purchased a $1.7 million three-bed on Riverside Drive.

WWD: For the first time, Us Weekly‘s Web site has surpassed People.com in number of unique visitors. The magazine seems to be getting along fine since longtime editor Janice Min‘s departure: acting EiC Michael Steele‘s first issue sold 1.1 million copies on newsstands.

Guardian: You can now buy single copies of The Economist in the U.K.

There’s news of two moves among sales teams at magazine publishers Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Bonnier Corp.

MediaDailyNews reports that MSLO has brought on Janet Balis (left) as executive vice president of media sales and marketing. She will oversee sales across the publishing, broadcast and digital properties and will report to MSLO’s executive chair Charles Koppelman. Balis joins MSLO from her own consutling company Digital Media Strategies, where she has worked for the past year and half. She also previously worked for Time Warner, where she served in positions at Time.com, People.com and AOL.

Over at Bonnier, Chris Allen, VP of group publishing and corporate sales for nine of the company’s travel, shelter and lifestyle titles, is departing after less than a month on the job, Mediaweek reported. Allen was hired to serve in one of two group publishing roles created by Bonnier when it acquired five titles from Hachette Filipacchi last month.

Mediaweek said Allen, who had previously served as publisher for Cooking Light, is leaving without another job lined up.

“It was more of a three- to four-week consulting trial,” Allen told Mediaweek. “I just think the nature of the job to be done on the particular titles was not what I expected it to be. I think I thought it was a larger, more strategic task than it was.”

Photo via MediaDailyNews

Let the paid content games begin. In an interview in today’s Telegraph Time Inc.’s CEO Ann Moore says “I think it is time for Time Inc to sit down and seriously think, what is the model? We are going to have to figure out a way to have paid content in the future…Who started this rumor that all information should be free and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out? I say this in college classrooms and they start to throw their shoes at me. I say, ‘Kids, your food is not free and your cars are not free, your clothes are not free. Good information costs money. Someone has to pay for the Baghdad bureau’.”

Moore adds that Time Inc. is considering whether or not to make Time.com and People.com subscription-based. It will be interesting to see what happens if they do decide to pursue a pay model especially since, even though People is Time Inc.’s top seller and drives huge amounts on traffic only, there is not shortage of free celebrity news. That said, someone will have to start paying, and shortly, and even if online subscriptions are not the answer, they may be enough to stem the ad slump till someone comes up with a more viable solution.