Jeneane Sessum notes a trend:
The old OLD pay for writers when I started out 25 years ago was $1 a word. During the dot-com era I was averaging $3 a word. At other times, the average compensation has fallen in the middle. For web content, I’ve made anywhere from $250 a page to $2,000 a page.
These last two weeks I’ve been checking out a few sources for writing work, and what I found was more depressing than I even imagined.
Responding to a dozen craigslist postings and 5 elance.com postings yielded four relevant replies.
The first, a woman who uses elance to outsource writing work to folks in India. I was, she explained, overqualified for the kind of work (and pay) she was offering. I did the math. It was pennies a word. She said I was overqualified. I have to think she’s right.
The next was a social media blogging gig, two posts per day minimum, with pay of $200/month, preceded by a testing period where hundreds of interested applicants would compete to get this primo gig. To the company’s credit, they offered $100 for the testing period.
Next I tried another online micro-job site that posts small jobs requiring a tiny bit (and nothing more) of human intelligence. Sample writing work there? 1000 word product guides. Pay: $5.00. In 1986 I would have made about $1,000 for that job. In 1999 I would have made $3,000 for that job. Today, some one will do it — maybe not well, but they’ll do it and search optimize it — for five bucks.
I’ve been checking out the employment ads myself, having narrowed down my search for employment to rather a limited geographical area: somewhere between Salt Lake City, San Diego, and El Paso. Somewhere in that small region, I started out thinking to myself, there will be an environmental non-profit that needs its newsletter edited. Or, more likely, written, edited, and typeset.
So far Craigslist hasn’t brought forward any such opportunities. But were I to decide I wanted to work with a Search Engine Optimization firm, churning out near-identical prose pieces on travel and cooking and technology and entertainment, I could be raking in, according to some of these offers, two bucks for a thousand words.
I watch the newspapers going under. Five years ago, I would have walked into a daily’s office and said “Hi. I’m a former Knight-Ridder garden writer, syndicated cross-country for years. Gimme some freelance work,” and I bet I’d have gotten some by the second cold call. Last week the Los Angeles Times pulled the plug on its Local and California news section, and the LA Times is a dreadnought newspaper. Friends who write a garden column in Another City (unidentified here because I wouldn’t be surprised if their readership reads this) have had their column repurposed to “handy household hints,” a.k.a service journalism, the sixth stage in the Kubler-Rossian death of a newspaper. Things are bleak in the newspaper column biz. It may be that the Barstow Desert Dispatch needs a garden writer (Monday: water. Tuesday: water.) but I’m not counting on it.
The hype being bandied about by bloggers is that blogging will replace the daily newspaper. This might be true, and that scares me. Can I get a show of hands? When’s the last time you found a blog that had consistent coverage of local news, well, anywhere? You do get some state- or regionally focused blogs, like frinstance Aunt B. Big cities get blogs like Gothamist and LAist. Those of you in Lincoln, Nebraska will find out about road construction bonds… how? The police blotter in Redding, California will be published where?
Something similar is happening to writing. The overnight democratization of writing via blogs has had undeniably good effects: people are expressing themselves, and that’s a good thing. But what kind of writing does blogging teach you to do? People have had very kind things to say about my writing over the years, but here’s the thing: to the degree I write well, my past editors get the credit. Editing is, at its best, mentoring: a sequence of “what did you mean to say here?” and “is this the best word choice?” and “huh? I can’t make heads nor tails of this paragraph” that serves to help you see what you writing actually says, rather than what you meant it to say.
Imagine the reaction you’d get from the typical blog owner if you said his/her second paragraph made no sense whatsoever. For all the vaunted “self-correcting nature” of the blog world, there isn’t much self-correction when it comes to the actual drafting and redrafting of your standard blog post.
Sturgeon’s Law applies, here as in most other things. The good news is that the existence of millions of blogs subject to Sturgeon’s Law means that there are still hundreds of thousands of blogs potentially worth reading.
The bad news is that the popular conception of writing seems to be tending toward the mean of that skewed distribution rather than the median, which is why the Search Engine Optimization people can offer folks two cents a word to write hand-crafted stealth spam comments and insta-blurbs that read as if constructed by way of Mad Libs. They’re offering what that stuff’s worth.
I have two trains of thought on what you’re saying here. One is, first, thanks for the kind words. But what scares me is seeing how much the traditional media is also relying on bloggers to find stories (at least here in Nashville) because I know that I, myself, anyway, am relying on other bloggers and the media to bring things to my attention. I don’t consider myself to be a reporter. I consider myself to be a bloviator in the best sense of the word. So, if newspapers and tv stations in my town are cutting reporters and relying on someone like me to find stories for them when I am relying on them (in part) to find things for me? How does that work?
How is that bringing us more or better news?
And yet, we have situations, like the fly ash spill, that the local media (and national) seems to think is a pretty done deal and if not for Tennessee bloggers continuing to hammer on it—talking about the radioactive materials and the health risks—I honestly don’t know where people who aren’t plugged into the environmental movement would hear about it.
And I find that scary. And I’ve been told, recently, to my face by someone who works at a TV station that the only reason they looked into it at all (a spill with an environmental impact on the scale of the Exxon disaster if not larger, which happened less than a three hour drive from us, in a way that could repeat itself at any coal plant run by the TVA) was that the bloggers were talking about it.
That’s right. You can dump tons of poison right in the middle of our state and ruin lives and kill wildlife and leave god knows what to affect generations and it would be ignored if not for the bloggers.
That scares the shit out of me, frankly.
But my other point is that I do think that real, good writing, happens between a writer and an editor and I often feel the lack of it in my own writing—that editorial hand.
I try to think of blogging as performance art so that I don’t die of some kind of cringe-induced spasm when I read old stuff I’ve written, but, yeah, editors are important and to be good at it is to be invisible to the reader and so I don’t think most people know what they’re missing in blog-writing.
It has been my observation that editors have vanished from traditional newspapers as well. Perfect example, the LA Times published an article the other day with one primary point: the “Second Lady” was being presumptuous by asking to be called “Dr. Biden.” Jill Biden finished her PhD in education a couple of years ago. The reporter claimed only Medical Doctors deserved a “Dr.” And she buttressed her argument by checking with a couple of colleagues at similar papers and quoting the style manual. She must have missed the 5,000 times the LA Times wrote about “Dr. Rice” in the Bush Admin.
It seems that copy in a modern newspaper moves directly from the reporter’s keyboard to typesetting without any higher-level review.
Maybe this is a side-effect of the automation, but I suspect few
reporters now see their stories come back with the kind of editing
they might have seen in the typewriter days.
Maybe, only the reporters who can seemingly produce “ready to print without revisions” stories are the reporters who still have newspaper jobs. I’m sure you wouldn’t recognize the combined stripped-down-to-nothing shop that produces the SJ Merc, CoCoTimes, Tribune, etc.
I wonder if there will be any kind of correction to this, a reinvention of news, editors, and filters. I don’t have any problem with the democratization of the internet in that I think it’s great that everyone who wants to can write and have a platform. The problem is filtering through the millions of blogs for the ones that are
knowledgeable, insightful and well written. I’ve come across some by chance and some through networks but I’m sure that there are others that I’ve not found.
I’ve noticed the same phenomenon, Chris, during my largely in-vain efforts to find paid writing work. When you’ve got thousands of amateurs willing to write for the glamour of being “in print” on an online site (not to mention a lot of experts giving it away for free in the expectation that it will translate into things like tenure) it’s challenging to make the case for paying a living wage for quality work.
I see similar things with regards to the photographic and craft communities; when there are a lot of people willing to share or sell cheap images and goods that they make as a hobby, it’s hard for those who want to make a full-time living at it.
The only solution that I can see is developing an educated audience who appreciates the artistry and skill involved in being a professional artist, writer, photographer, etc. Right now we’re living in the age of the amateur triumphant, where any criticism is passed off as mere envy. It’s disturbing.
Maybe there is a market for providing online editorial services to bloggers. Would experts in fields blogging on their topics of expertise want to run them by someone with facility for language and grammar so that they can ensure someone doesn’t unfairly dismiss their arguments? I don’t think the instantaneous nature of blogging needs to be an obstacle. I doubt if many of the bloggers do their more thoughtful posts on the fly rather than mull over them, do the needed reseach to fill the links etc. I’m sure they can delay it for editorial check, as long as it is not too much of a delay. I don’t know if there is a market for such services or not. Maybe some percentage of traffic based revenue can be provided as payment. (I just checked - grammarnazi.com is taken :-P)
I’ve encountered much the same in recent years. I used to write teaching materials on agriculture under contract to the Ontario government. However, quite some time ago, they began cutting back on available contract work, choosing to revise old materials rather than create anything new. The next step was to not bother with updates and revisions—just slap on new covers with a different publication date.
Now, most of my work is in photography - mainly invertebrates. A few years ago, publishers at least hinted that they were willing to pay a licensing fee for use of images. Now, many of the image requests flatly state something to the effect: “We would like so much to use your wonderful image of XXX, but unfortunately, we’re on a tight budget. However, we’re prepared to include a photo credit which would give you terrific exposure.”
I wonder how many wannabe photographers are calving to these offers? Good cameras aren’t cheap. Maintaining a decent online photo gallery is laborious and costs at least a little for storage space. Digging up original image files upon request is time-consuming. Why are so many people willing to fork over their image files for zero compensation? It’s one thing to provide images for non-profit organizations that you wish to support, but to do so for publications or services that charge a fee to the public? There’s something wrong with that picture. The interesting thing that I’ve discovered is that if you dig in and say that you aren’t able to provide images for free, at least two times out of three, the publication will *then* offer to come up with some compensation.