Ever wonder how those bright, not very insightful little blurbs about restaurants, shops and nightlife get onto all the city search websites you mostly don't read? They come from people who reply to calls for freelancer slaves. Like this one:

We need to hire a few freelance folks to help us write up venue descriptions for a new Los Angeles Times project called The Guide. We are a new, comprehensive city guide project covering restaurants, bars, clubs, events, music, shopping ­ all the stuff to do in LA.

We need help right away covering restaurants, bars and clubs, working neighborhood by neighborhood. We'll pay $10 per venue. That means getting all the details (correct name, address, phone, web URL) and attributes (smoking, parking, etc.) and a smart, funny 150-word
description of the place.

It also means grabbing an exterior and interior photo with a digital camera. If that's not something you've done before, let's talk about it, as we may hire freelance photographers or figure out some other arrangement on the photos.

You submit the texts to in an MSWord document, then someone edits them, kicks them back to you and you upload them into our system. You will receive guidelines on how to do all this. The photos are then sent to our photo editor, who crops and loads and does all that good
stuff.

We have many neighborhoods left to cover, from Westside neighborhoods like Marina del Rey to the San Fernando Valley to Orange and San
Bernardino counties. We cover five counties total: LA, Ventura, OC, Riverside, and San Bernardino.

Anyone who's done this kind of work before, or who knows they can do it, send a couple short (~150 words), punchy write-ups to my editor, so he can see what you do. His info is below. And do it ASAP: we need to load all this stuff during the month of October, so time is getting short.

This pitch is from Dean Kuipers, who left CityBeat in June for the L.A. Times project.