WARNING: I’m about to make statement that is so revolutionary that you might begin to question my sanity. It’s a goal for writers that will seem not only unattainable, but impossible: as if I’ve been living on an entirely different planet. What I’m going to propose is that writers at mainstream magazines–particularly the ones in the Conde Nast empire, but also Wenner Media, and Hearst–should be paid not only a living wage, but one that values them in the same way that magazines sell their writing to advertisers.  I’m going to suggest that writers at the top magazines in America should make at least $20 per word.

 

The number is ten times the standard going rate of $2 that most magazines pay (check out current rates at my crowdsourced Google Doc).  However, given the current economics of the industry, I have to argue that it also is the only fair rate for our work after you account for how much print advertisements sell for. Take for instance the fact that average rate that Conde Nast sells a single page of advertising to their clients for is about $130,000. Magazines vary pretty widely in their page count, but over the last few days I’ve counted the adds in about a dozen different issues and the smallest magazines have about 30 ads, the fattest more than 100. For argument’s sake, lets saw that the average Conde Nast magazine has 50 pages of advertising. After they give their clients a steep discount, they reap about $70,000 per page in revenues. It’s pretty conservative to say that a run of the mill Conde Nast magazine makes at least $3.5 million per issue. At the very most, the fattest mags in the empire run about 40,000 words for a total payout of $80,000 to writers. That’s only  1% of its gross revenues dedicated to words. However, if you were to ask just about any reader I’m pretty sure that they would tend to agree that words and stories make up more than 1% of the value of a magazine.

 

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Writers tend to keep their thoughts in the realm of ideas rather than calculate the seemingly mundane matter of the mechanics of the trade. However, a few months ago I sat down in a Chinese restaurant with a friend of mine who writes for the New Yorker and we agreed to leave our narrative musings to the side and think about practicalities. We were going to try to figure out how much the printed word is worth in America today.

 

We wanted to calculate how many feature stories the top magazines in America assign every year, and how much they typically pay their writers for the assignments. The list was only going to be for the top publications in America–the ones that pay between $1.50-$5 per word and that comprise the top tier of journalism. These are the magazines that line the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere and the ones that we write for pretty regularly. Think The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Wired, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, O, The Atavist, and the dozen or so other magazines that sits on the tops of toilet tanks and the tables of dentist offices from Seattle to Orlando.

 

It was back of the envelope math at best, but as far as either one of us could determine, it was the first time anyone had tried to figure out how biG the pie was for long form freelance writing in America.  There are hundreds of amazing writers in the country, delving into stories that drive the national conversation on everything from politics to the cult of celebrity to human rights abuses to cutting edge scientific and technological discoveries. These are the types of pieces that we make a living on, and ones that, frankly, we feel are important to write.

 

After ten minutes listing the average number of features in each magazine multiplied by the number of issues annually we had a number: 800. On average these stories would run at about 3000 words and pay $1.50 per word.  It was only a ball-park estimate of the overall freelance writing market cap. But it was also a rather depressing one.  Let me put this in bold so it stands out on the page.

 

The total market for long form journalism in major magazines in America is approximately $3.6 million.  To put it another way: the collective body of writers earned less than Butch Jones, a relatively unknown college football coach, earned in a single year. 

 

$3.6 million. That’s it. And the math gets even more depressing. If we assume that writers should earn the average middle class salary of $50,000 a year, then there’s only enough money in that pot to keep 72 writers fully employed.  And, of course, those writers would have to pen approximately 11 well thought out and investigated features per year–something that both my friend and I knew was almost impossible.

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I don’t write novels, but this morning I got a message from the website Webucator asking me for my thoughts on National Novel Writing Month.In particular they wanted to know what it means to write for a living.  Regular readers will remember that I recently published a short ebook on the freelance writing career path called The Quick and Dirty Guide to Freelance Writing about how to attain that elusive dream of quitting your day job and working for yourself. So, perhaps, they wondered, I could share a few thoughts on how to write for a living.

• What were your goals when you started writing?

Sometimes I feel like I didn’t choose to be a writer, but that writing chose me.I’d failed or been fired from every other job I’d tried over the years and writing was the only thing that I was ever good at. Part of the problem, of course, is that I have an almost adolescent rejection of authority and working on other people’s projects always seemed less fulfilling than working on my own things. I also have a predilection for exploration and adventure. Writing has given me an excuse to spend months at a time pursuing strange and unusual subjects and call it a career.  As I mention in the book, my first real assignment came after I’d dropped out of graduate school and enrolled in a clinical trial for the erectile dysfunction drug Levitra. I thought that it was hilarious that I was going to be stuck in a room with 30 other dudes on penis-poppers and decided to write to Nerve.com to see if they wanted a feature on the subject. They did, and a writing career was born. Continue reading…

For the last few years I’ve been chewing on the idea of writing a book about the business of freelance writing. Every few weeks someone e-mails me out of the internet ether asking how they can jumpstart their writing career. It turns out that most journalism programs offer a lot of advice about how to write a compelling story, but fail almost completely at teaching their students how to make a living if they don’t have a staff job.

In an age of declining advertising revenues, thinner magazines and ubiquitous free media it would seem that it’s harder than ever to make a name for yourself in the pages of mainstream publications. I wrote The Quick and Dirty Guide to Freelance Writing to buck the assumption that writers have to give their work away for free if they want to break into the industry.

Writing, it turns out, is just like any other business. Yes, it’s difficult to get up and running, but with a little perseverance and a few great story ideas, there is nothing preventing someone from making a name for themselves. In the book, I dissect the several different reliable revenue streams for freelancers, break down the ways that most magazines are structured and diagram out the typical lifecycle of a story from its inception through its eventual publication. The book explores the proper way to deal with publishing contracts (ProTip: don’t sign away copyright or movie rights) and includes almost a dozen examples of successful pitches that I’ve sold over the last ten years of my career.

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This morning jihadists belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheaded Steven Sotloff.  Two weeks ago the same British-accented militant murdered James Foley. Both events were recorded on tape and sent out to the mass media as part of an ongoing propaganda war against the West’s military intervention in the Middle East. Both Sotloff and Foley were freelance journalists who traveled to Syria to cover the crumbling Asad regime. Their deaths, while tragic beyond belief, also highlight a major problem with the way that mainstream publications choose to cover the war at the expense of their people in the field. Neither Foley nor Sotloff were household names. They submitted their work to lesser-known news outlets like the Global Post and Foreign Policy. They traveled abroad on shoestring budgets–like I have many times before–and embedded themselves in the heart of the conflict. They made very little money when they sold their stories and photographs to the media, and it seems that the only reason they were there was to raise awareness of the horrible on-going violent conflagrations in the Middle East that have taken far too many lives already.

Reporter’s lives are often at risk in the field, but in the last decade freelancers have borne the brunt of the consequences. Even though news budgets have contracted, news organizations are still thirsty for front line coverage. Since they decline to send their own people they depend primarily on journalists like Sotloff and Foley to get to the front lines no matter what risks they might take along the way.  Publications see this as an easy way to cut costs. There are certainly many writers brave or stupid enough to put themselves at the heart of a conflict, but media companies who hire freelancers balk whenever one of their temporary correspondents asks for insurance, or logistical support should they get into trouble.

Every reporter sent by NPR or the New York Times life-saving Kidnap and Ransom insurance polices on their heads. They often have safe houses to report to, logistical staff to help them get out of trouble. Keeping a staff correspondent safe is expensive business, but it also means that when they get into trouble that professional hostage negotiators will help secure their release and, often pay the million dollar ransoms that generally get allocated in these sorts of situations.  Though there are certainly problems with paying ransoms as it simply encourages future kidnappings–for abductees a secure payment will mean the difference between getting a ticket back home or becoming a bloody piece of propaganda.  Continue reading…

In 2006, a child with only one eye in the center of her fore head was born in Chennai, India. The severe chromosomal disorder was aptly known as Cyclopia. When I went to research her case, the hospital told me that the mother was taking an unusual fertility treatment. There was a chance that she was the subject of an illegal clinical trial for an American anti-cancer drug. I wrote about her case in The Red Market and photos of the child went viral on the Internet after I posted them on my blog at at Wired.

The photos have since gone on to have a life of their own on the internet–particularly in the Muslim world. According to Islamic tradition*, right before the apocalypse a one-eyed prophet named Masih ad-Dajjal will emerge and teach a wildly popular and totally false gospel. People will follow the unholy teaching and get drawn into the Devil’s influence.

In 2009, the image that I took in Chennai went viral among apocalyptic muslims who were sure that the end was nigh. They wrote that the child was born in Israel and, as one viral e-mail stated, that “Dajjal will appear somewhere between Iraq and Syria , after the Battle of Istanbul takes place.”  At the time, the photo resonated with Iraqis who were contending with American occupation and violent inter-sectarian conflict. The battle of Istanbul had not yet happened, but the world seemed to be falling apart. When the viral emails spread thousands of hits would flood my website.

Every now and then there would be a voice of reason when moderate Muslim websites would debunk the new claims and link to my work as the original source of the image. For a time, the popularity of the image would die down. Today, however, a new brand of violent fundamentalist Islam is spreading across the Middle East. As this lunatic fringe of Islam sweeps across Iraq and Syria leaving a bloody wake of murder and destruction in its path, it’s no surprise that many Muslims feel that the end of days is at hand once again.

In the last week I have been getting an inordinate number of hits on my website searching for pictures of the cyclopian child. After the break I’ll post the photo, but beware, some readers will find it disturbing.

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