News Break Just Rejected Me
By: Kavish Kamat, Kk
Tags: Self Improvement, Failure, Writing, Rejection, Motivation

News Break Just Rejected Me

Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

News Break Creator Program is the talk of the down these days in the writer fraternity. Any why not, it’s not always that you get such a lucrative offer served on a platter. With $3000 for 36 articles up for grabs and a referral bonus of $250, the proposal looked too good to be true.

The program allows reposting your previous blog or Medium content, making the entire offer feel like a cakewalk. Especially for the established writers with thousands of articles and millions of followers, this was the icing on the cake.

I initially got introduced to the News Break Creator Program through a Quora question. To check out more details, I tried to google it, but nothing much productive was available. The only information accessible was the $3000 price tag for 36 articles over three months timeline.

I decided to give it a skip, as the saying goes —

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is not true.

Over the next few days, Philip Hofmacher and Sinem Günel brought up the topic for discussion in their Facebook group “Medium Writing Academy Mastermind”, of which I was a part.

The topic caught steam, and considering Top Writers were getting enrolled in the program, it gave me confidence, and I decided to follow their trail.

I finally applied for the program on 24th November using Sinem’s referral link. I received a mail confirmation from News Break with a 5–7 days timeline for getting a final response to the application. I was confident of getting the contract as most of the group discussions mentioned that they had not seen any rejections from the company.

Now started the nervous wait. Even though we are used to most of the major publications’ two-week timeline, this wait seemed longer. Most of the newbies like me had never imagined writing for such a price tag. I started thinking of topics for those 36 all important stories that would get me my highest income as a writer to date.

Over the week, News Break was the most discussed topic on the Facebook group. The ones who got in were querying on the functionality and comparing the terms of the contract. The others sitting out like me were keenly watching the discussion to keep ourselves updated and ready for the game.

The feeling was like a runner crouched on a starting block, waiting for the gun, to start a sprint.

There was so much buzz about the program that Phillip decided to open a new group called News Break Creator Program Mastermind to segregate the discussion from the Medium group. I would have been among the first few to get into the group to avoid losing out on any action.

Five days had passed, but there was no response. The only comforting thing was that most of the group members had not received any reply. The group’s consensus was that it would result from staff absenteeism due to the holiday season. All this while, I kept monitoring my mailbox every few hours to ensure that I don’t miss the contract due to the mail dropping in the spam, as Phillip suggested.

On the sixth day, i.e., 30th November, my anxiety took the better of me, and I wrote back to News Break to inquire about my application’s status. But I didn’t hear anything from them.