The Core

James,
Depends on the quality you are after.  Philippinos do cheap.  imho. What is you limitation with textbroker? 

Is it type of content?
Price?
quality to low or High? 

I have had Philippino, Madagascan (for french) a Swiss German Parisian  for German, writing for me, all different qualities, and all different prices.  I have known an article to cost £50, or $1.6.

Someone (cannot remember who,)  posted this.  Not tried it yet:

http://www.purecontent.com/

purecontent will hit quality but probably not at that price. Good when you need some intelligence behind whats being generated though.

Slightly related - anyone know any good cheap english language audio/video transcription services? I've used some in the past but for ad hoc stuff they tend to be either expensive or rubbish. I don't need any type of industry specific knowledge at the moment, just good accuracy at a decent price, and ability to timestamp would be handy.

We've been using Craigslist to find writers

Interesting.  I've always had very very good luck finding good writers on TextBroker.  I've only had two bad experiences with them.  Everyone else is very good, very professional.

Ah, yes, I bet London would be expensive. Should be cheaper in the sticks.  might be someone at a job centre even, or put an ad in the post office. Must be plenty of Mums about who could do it.

>craigslist

Same here and, overall, it's worked out decently but you are going to have assume an active editor-in-charge role. Even so,  you are going to be panning for gold and only one of five is going to produce something you can use. So I reduced my payout to .005 per word and at that price I can afford to cull or perhaps remix.  I've also found 3 superpro writers via Craigslist --they are pricey .05/word but their work has been incredible.  I've generally used their works as centerpiece articles though at somewhat secondary positions in the network pyramid.

By far the best quality writers were name-brand print magazine freelancers. I bought 2nd rights to their print articles.  Some required some tweaking (usually to make them evergreen) but these are my root articles. Their job is to provide legitimacy.

I also have a "Write For Us" page linked from the footer.  It has brought in a few directly. It's also very handy for quickly regimenting any writer, no matter where I found him.  One writer that came in directly had been trained by Demand Media.  The quality was slightly above the CL average but -damn- the volume and speed he could produce was almost disconcerting.

James, got myself one at TB that writes an article a week, I put 10 up for her at a time, and she has learned how to load it into wordpress.  So now I have little hands on, just the occasional bit of encouragement

Planning to give her more, so rather not share her!  (feel awful saying that should I? )

 Gurtie... Grandmothers... good ol' Brizzle.

BTW James.  India is cheaper than the Philippines,  but the work ethic not as good.  imho.  Not a vaste experience, but worth condidering.