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Fellow Writers: Is $50 the New Pay?
I started this piece last year as a humorous rant, but it’s no joke.
When I worked as a freelance journalist in the old days — that is, when type was still “set” and magazines “went to bed” — the going rate for freelancers was a dollar a word. Some of the more desirable venues, like The New York Times, paid far less. Seeing your byline in the venerable “gray lady” of journalism was supposed to be payment enough.
When I landed an assignment from New York magazine in 1977, I earned three dollars a word. Other writers might have earned more. In any case, it’s not much of a windfall when you consider that a 2500-word piece for such a high-profile venue involved around ten months from pitch to publication. In between were editorial notes, some helpful, some maddeningly vague after the first draft was submitted: “This wasn’t what I was looking for.”
Write, rewrite, rehash. Some pieces went better than others. I won’t bother doing the actual math, but I’m sure I made less than twenty cents an hour during the 90s and 00s. But hey! I was “in” New York magazine, sometimes the cover story.
What We Do for Love (of Writing)
I spent only a few minutes minutes in the early 2000s chatting with a twentysomething writer at a…
