2013-03-06 10:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineI am, occasionally, still a paid freelance journalist and blogger, so when the minor dust-up between Nate Thayer and The Atlantic crossed my twitstream this morning, I used it as a slight sanity break between work items at my day job.
Summary:
- Thayer wrote a piece which The Atlantic wanted to re-use/have summarized by the author
- Thayer points out that doing so for free is not going to work for him
There's nothing wrong with that narrative, and, in fact, that's the way it's supposed to work; getting eyeball exposure is what bloggers do on their own time (witness: this, my wordpress blog, and so on), whether they monetize that via ads or referral links or whatever.
When you're hired to do something, you should get paid for doing it in some kind of real and tangible and, most importantly, valuable manner.
But what blew my mind about this is what Thayer said near the end of the correspondence, that he was previously offered a $125,000 retainer to write six articles. Twenty-one thousand bucks an article is... well, it's quite a bit more than what I'm accustomed to, by about a factor of 100 to 1000. The hundred-dollar figure for the 1200 word summary is a lot more in line with the pay scale I, and the other freelancers I've worked with, usually see.
Assuming that these are weighty, five to ten thousand word explorations, the price per word is still fairly astonishing, and none of the full-time writers I know of command nearly so rubust a sum.
Thayer's summary:
https://natethayer.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-freelance-journalist-2013/
Atlantic's:
http://www.magnetmail.net/actions/email_web_version.cfm?recipient_id=699462885&message_id=2523507&user_id=NJG_Atlan&group_id=0&jobid=13303265
Summary:
- Thayer wrote a piece which The Atlantic wanted to re-use/have summarized by the author
- Thayer points out that doing so for free is not going to work for him
There's nothing wrong with that narrative, and, in fact, that's the way it's supposed to work; getting eyeball exposure is what bloggers do on their own time (witness: this, my wordpress blog, and so on), whether they monetize that via ads or referral links or whatever.
When you're hired to do something, you should get paid for doing it in some kind of real and tangible and, most importantly, valuable manner.
But what blew my mind about this is what Thayer said near the end of the correspondence, that he was previously offered a $125,000 retainer to write six articles. Twenty-one thousand bucks an article is... well, it's quite a bit more than what I'm accustomed to, by about a factor of 100 to 1000. The hundred-dollar figure for the 1200 word summary is a lot more in line with the pay scale I, and the other freelancers I've worked with, usually see.
Assuming that these are weighty, five to ten thousand word explorations, the price per word is still fairly astonishing, and none of the full-time writers I know of command nearly so rubust a sum.
Thayer's summary:
https://natethayer.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-freelance-journalist-2013/
Atlantic's:
http://www.magnetmail.net/actions/email_web_version.cfm?recipient_id=699462885&message_id=2523507&user_id=NJG_Atlan&group_id=0&jobid=13303265
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(no subject)
I do know that articles in The Atlantic, compared to stuff only on the web sites, tends to be longer than most other non-academic periodicals. I rarely read the paper version, but I've dealt with online pagination of 12+ pages fairly frequently with them. I do not know what they usually pay their writers, though. Also, it may be that Thayer was offered a salary of $125K with an expectation of 6 long-format pieces per year, and he'd definitely be doing some other work, too. That makes sense with what I know of salaries in DC.
Also, my feeling is that Bennet and Stossel (mag editor) would not be comfortable having Atlantic interns or staff do a condensed version of the original article, even with attribution in the way that Thayer is suggesting is common practice (and I have seen elsewhere). I haven't spent as much time with Cohn (online editor) as I have with the other two, and I'm not sure if this was a request from the magazine or the web site.