Okay. I will lay some cards on the table on the currently argument-inducing arena of writer pay. At The Awl, essentially what we pay in total for freelance pieces is 10% of *gross* site revenue. Overall it might be more than 10%. (And I do not mean 10% of net revenue, mind you, which is a radically different number than gross.) I do not know if this is fair or right. I do not know if it scales appropriately for either side, ours or the writers. (That's actually an important consideration, not an idle one; if it scales too poorly for our side, guess what, The End.) But still I find it dissatisfying.

How do we assess what online freelance pieces should cost per publication?

From my perspective there are two considerations to balance: my desire to write the piece in question, and the publication's ability to pay. Sometimes the decision is 100% on one side or the other.

What Thayer kind of missed (in addition to the good points Felix Salmon raised blogs.reuters.com) is that nobody gets paid much at first, in almost any industry. And that's not new. In fact James Thurber wrote for the New Yorker for free, at first. So Thayer is a known professional quantity and has earned credibility and audience and thereby, presumably, a solid rate per word. But nobody starts out with that.

At Boing Boing, I have a vague budget of $1000-$2000 a month for freelance work and pay $250 or $350 for "journalism" and $50 or so for "blogging royale", you know, Game of Thrones recaps and what-have-you. Editors handle the normal blogging duties. It's all quite easy-going, though, and occasionally folks will want to write something free of charge or we'll finance something crazy that we know won't get traffic, but needs to exist.

I don't think we solicit freebies, except by accident. Moreover, I have a strong and growing inclination toward a strict mix of oldschool linkblogging and high-quality feature writing, with less mid-length stuff and less "bro deal" posts.

We have no idea what we are doing.

Reported vs. opinion does seem to be a way to distinguish appropriate levels of payment.

I make "a" living at what I think Felix Salmon means by "freelance digital journalism," i.e. longish pieces that are "blog posts" but typically involve some research. So I can say that it is possible. But I have focussed my contributions on outlets that pay more than $50-$100. I also work 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week.

I did write for free in the beginning and still do, sometimes. It's worth it if your editors are good, and if it is not a place using the "throw everything at the wall" theory of web traffic. Which is how I felt about the Awl. I wouldn't get the work I do now without having started there for free.

Also! The NYRB started off asking its writers to write for free, fun fact!

Michelle, it's very interesting to look at historical models for independent publications that didn't pay. I actually don't think I knew that about the NY Review.

Washington City Paper, on the other hand, paid more back in the pre-Internet days (when alt-weeklies were flush with classifieds and other cash that resulted from having a monopoly on non-daily-newspaper advertising in their markets).

We pay at least SOMETHING for every post, though it's less for blog posts than for print, which is a completely arbitrary distinction theoretically justified by the fact that we make so much more of our money on print ads than digital. The bulk of those posts, though, don't require much reporting; they're short write-ups of new songs by local artists, or that sort of thing. We pay about $15-$25 for a short blog post, which isn't enough, but we also underpay our staffers, so...

The point of my piece is that the concept of "a writer" is becoming increasingly outdated. As Choire and Alex know, digital journalism is about so much more than just writing. But they do have this model where they solicit contributions from writers, and then do all the rest of the work themselves. I think Rob has much the same model. It's digital, but it has one foot in the old world of writers write, editors edit, etc. It's an interesting intermediate step.

Curious: to what degree do editors / publishers (at different publications) talk with each other about how much they're paying?

I like percentage of gross as a total: keeps the total elastic and sane. But it leaves the question of individual items and rates open.

Paid by traffic? Bleurgh. Traffic is for editors to fret over, not contributors, so that measure seems better aimed at who gets assignments, rather than what they're paid for them.

"A little bit more than whatever the writers you want are prepared to write for" seems right, but maybe too ruthless? So we end up with wild stabs in the dark, nailing decent word rates without thinking too hard about it.

It's a shame Branch isn't a long lunch spent on the verge of inebriation. That would sort it.

What really rankles is when one hears that management is (to paraphrase Anne Hathaway in that Batman movie) "living so large, and leaving so little for the rest of us." A circumstance hardly unique to journalism, in our enlightened age.

I've been really hesitant to put a hard number on this because even after just a few months, there's been a broad range depending on the writer and the piece. There are newer writers getting paid more than they ever have doing 5,000+word features that lot of people are seeing. There are also seasoned magazine writers taking a fraction of what they'd normally get to do the same amount of work, at the same level, and faster.

There's no point in us doing these pieces unless they're as good as or better than something you'd see in print, but we still have to deal with the fact that there's a huge gulf in resourcesand expectations. I have a budget for the year, but figuring how to dole that out is a work in progress, for sure.

(I'm only talking about long-lead features that I assign here, not posts in general.)

I don't make a living off of freelance article writing--how could I?--but would love a base rate supplemented by traffic-driven bonuses with performance reports and strong social media promotion. The platform for promotion *IS* worth something to me. So give it up a little please. Tell your zillion Twitter followers to follow MEEEEEEEEEE. Do the things that make me feel special, like you'd do for a millennial or a rich person. Then the promise of "platform" is real and worthwhile. Otherwise it really translates to like 15K hits max and the idea that somehow you are "out there" with 7 billion other charticles. Beyond that I get about a buck or two a word.

Mike, in answer to your question about if we editors talk about this stuff.... WEIRDLY, in my experience, we talk about it very little! We're all so skittish about numbers, and it's sort of sad. We should probably get over that.

For more transparency: At Outside, I have a monthly freelance budget of about $20,000, give or take, for the site, but most of that is locked up in 12 people I have on contract for 2013. It would be impossible for my small on-staff team to solicit and edit and produce and invoice and etc. that much work, so long-term commitments with writers is ideal, for me, and, often, for them. They're not huge contracts, but they are guaranteed work. That said, every contract is a little different -- and the leftover money we spend on one-off pieces can go toward everything from a $75 Q&A to a $1,500 online-only "feature." Over the past year, I've paid as little as nothing and as much as $5,000 for Web work. Everything is negotiable.

Another consideration: the role of (for lack of better term) The Little Magazine that edits/cultivates. A magazine (no-profit, no money in sight) I co-edit, avidly.org, edited a piece, "Why I Write for Free," that was just picked up/republished by The Atlantic Wire. The writer was paid for it, which we fully fully fully support. But this skimming model seems odd. (Ironically, we also just ran a "Why I Don't Write for Free" piece that seems unlikely to be picked up/republished.....!!!)

To echo Choire, I don't think we talk about the numbers enough. In fact, I think most editors -- and certainly most writers -- don't even know the numbers. Not all of them anyway.

Everyone wants to get paid as much as they can for their work, obviously. But when you look at traffic and what ads are bringing in -- and any additional revenue streams -- you find that most stories (at least at Outside and at The Atlantic, where I was before this) can't make back even the tiny amount they cost (and that's before you even start considering overhead and editor time). The blockbusters end up subsidizing everything else.

The numbers Nicholas gives sound about right to me, though it gets a little muddled at Businessweek, because sometimes section editors assign freelance stuff that only appears online, but that comes out of their budgets (which are oriented to print, not digital, pay scales), not mine.

I will say I don't feel right asking people to write for free, or even allowing them to, although we do have some regular unpaid contributors. A reporter I know pitched me some very good ideas, and when I told him I didn't have the budget for them, he offered to do them for free. It didn't feel fair to say yes. (Maybe it wasn't fair to say No, either.)

To both Felix and Michelle's points: I think it's useful to remember that this issue, or whatever you want to call it, question maybe, might not be that new--or at least that it's always been relative, in a similar way, both to the kind of writing, the kind of publication, etc.

At The Observer, a big part of the point was to "locate underleveraged talent" or whatever. In other words, find incredibly talented people who had to establish their fair market value. So by definition we paid below wholesale for what we were publishing, we thought. When the writers establish their position in the market, they get a higher rate or they get poached by someone who wants to pay them more. An ecosystem that actually RELIES on differential rates, right?

The "farm system" that Tom is talking about here has always been very real in New York City writing work. The Observer was a *huge* example of this for years. They made peanuts! Then off they went, to enjoy their NYT editorship.

The "Moneyball" model.

Using the Sicha Method of Freelance Payment Determination, I pay a little under 25% of weekly gross revenue for a week of guest editing kottke.org. Payment is usually made the day after. That's for blogging, which is not exactly the same as writing feature articles for an online magazine. I always give people a choice: I can pay you or you can do it for the glory/fun/experience/whatever. And I honestly don't care which it is...I am happy to pay people. Currently the fun/$$ split among former editors is about 50/50.

Right--and it relies really zero percent on the "rise of digital" element--it was true before the web was a factor.

Which is not to say that digital is *not* a factor; just that it would be useful to sort out what are new issues and what are old ones. Pre-web, we never viewed an article on a page as having had x number of "reads" and then counted them against the adjoining ads on that page to determine value. That does strike me as a difference, for better or worse.

It works. I went from being underpaid at Washington City Paper (hey Madden!) to making literally billions of dollars an hour at BuzzFeed.

But on a serious note...some of the most satisfying work I've done was for free or for peanuts. I can't quite figure out why that is. But because of that I think "writing for free" has a value for young writers that shouldn't be underestimated.

The problem with the Atlantic's apparent policy of sometimes not paying writers, which seems to have started this whole thing, is that it encourages the rest of us to do the same; their budget is partly funded by things like the Aspen Ideas Festival and its corporate sponsors, after all. Tom is right that there's always been a pay scale hierarchy, but what's new now seems to be that the organizations that should be at the top of that pay hierarchy are trying to get away with not paying writers commensurately.

Oops, Branch #fail. I put this in the wrong place: For people who don't need to pay rent from their freelance writing income, I'm a fan of paying in things like boozy lunches or cases of wine. It costs less and means more.

Mike, to be clear, the Atlantic does NOT have a policy of sometimes not paying writers. If you're writing for them, they will pay you, even if it's only $100. That's the idea, anyway. An editor on her second day in the job kinda screwed up when asking if she could reprint an article from elsewhere, and ended up asking for the writer to rewrite the whole piece at shorter length. Which she should have offered to pay him for, or, really, she shouldn't have asked for in the first place.

Got it, Felix -- though I've also heard from another writer that she was asked to write an essay for the Atlantic's site and was told they didn't pay for that sort of thing. Glad to hear that's not the official line, though.

Editors: how do you feel about being asked for more money? How long should one wait before asking, on what grounds can such a request legitimately be based, etc.

In my experience, the numbers have gotten more occult over time. At Gawker--which fits Felix Salmon's description of contemporary places that pay for staff and have a vestigial appendage of a freelance budget--we do tons of repubs and publications for "exposure," but also do idiosyncratic piece-rate calculations that try to account for the capital costs of doing the piece and/or the expected traffic value and/or the writer's market value. Whereas when I got started at City Paper in Baltimore, two decades ago, it was: 10 cents per word.

And but it is true that Gawker Media has a history of often succeeding, through "exposure," at identifying and hiring and promoting people.

Felix and Mike: This isn't completely true. Each channel editor at The Atlantic has his or her own monthly budget to spend as he or she sees fit. Almost all go with a standard $x per piece model, but it varies. When I launched The Atlantic's Health channel a year ago, my budget was small -- it was an experiment, even if under a huge brand -- and so I published plenty of pieces without paying (though almost always from doctors or other professionals who weren't writing for a living).

Also, the Atlantic does carve out an exception for what they consider "opinion". That, they're happy to run without payment.

I want to throw something out that bugs me, and bugged me when I was editing at Harpers.org: Not paying feels like it deceives the reader. They are expecting that the publication is in charge. But when you get people to write for free you're in a constant give-and-take with the writer's agenda instead of trying to serve the reader's needs. For that reason I'm very suspicious of free content--it's bad for readers and it weakened me as an editor.

This incoherent, occult atmosphere is particularly difficult to navigate for a beginner. It's impossible to tell whether one is asking too much or not enough. I expect I am probably not "leaning in" enough haha.

I have a pretty minuscule/non-existant freelance budget at Splitsider, so most of my contributors are unpaid. But the interesting thing that I've found is that young, hungry writers who pitch me and want to work for free are far, far more reliable than more established writers who I offer $100-150 to. A sizable percentage of people I offer money to flake on me, far more than people I don't pay.

And because of that (and for plenty of other reasons), as the site grows I'm much more likely to hire people rather than start paying more freelancers. I'd rather hire someone who has written for me for free in the past and then need less outside contributions.

Felix seemed to be arguing in his piece that freelancers aren't all that important to most online publications, and while that's certainly true for a few places, is it the norm? I know the aggregation's all done in-house for time reasons, and the staff produces some of the major posts, but I had the impression that freelancers are still integral to almost every publication except for maybe GM and some of the Atlantic sites. Felix estimated 5% of the writing budget at Atlantic goes to freelancers - does anyone else have a sense of what this figure would be elsewhere?

(Or, alternately, what % of posts are produced by freelancers?)

When I was at the Voice freelancers were the section's lifeblood. If I had to do all those posts on my own I probably would have died.

For general interest publications I doubt that most of what you'd call "reviewers" are full-time employees. At magazines, there are "contract writers" but that's not quite the same.

(I was also under what you might call "budget pressure" from the higher-ups a lot of the time, because they were into the whole blood-from-stones thing.)

YES Adam. There are some strange forces at play. There's a much stronger relationship between writers' respect/desire to write for an editor or publication and the resulting quality of the work than between rate and quality. (Up to a point — I suspect this falls apart a bit when you're dealing with pieces that require a large time investment.)

That you can't just *buy* better work is one of the many reasons it's hard to come up with fair rates. Soooooooooooo I guess I'll just go with some kind of Kantian copout? The CATEGEDITORIAL IMPERATIVE.

We couldn't produce our arts coverage without freelancers, who write the vast majority of it, both for print and online.

Right, when I was at Portfolio I was on contract there, making a monthly salary. Technically I might have been a freelancer, but that's not the kind of thing I had in mind. Strip out the staffers and the staffers-in-all-but-name, as well as partner content etc -- anything negotiated on a case-by-case basis is freelance.

Yeah, I actually had a small monthly freelancer budget, but it was so frustrating to try to dole out that I ended up giving it all to one reliable person to be a part-time feature writer who does a couple pieces a week for me. It's so much better.

I'd say about 1/3 of our material is freelance-written, and about 1/3 to 1/2 our editorial budget.

At Popular Science, we're pretty good about paying for work; I've certainly never asked someone to write a piece for free (photography, sadly, is a totally different story. I feel for photographers!).

But! We've been discussing the "blog network" model, in which an existing blogger tosses their stuff over on our larger site, for basically pennies (like, a few hundred bucks a month). I get why it's popular; it's super cheap and a source of lots of content, and every once in awhile you get a great writer like Phil Plait or Matt Novak. But on the other hand, this is a direct request for as-close-to-free-as-possible content. And the content is often not edited/good. And I'm not sure readers distinguish between the site and the site's "blogs."

I suspect that certain disciplines might be special cases if you want breadth, too; music is one of those subjects that needs a large variety of voices, if only because there's so much of it out there. Even if you're a genre-specific publication, there's still a lot of subgenre wiggle room.

@Dan: They don't.

People keep talking about "exposure" as a trade-off for low/no pay, but I think the "fulfillment" factor is much more important, especially for younger writers. Are you writing what you want, for the audience you want? Do you have control over your own words? Then obviously you will accept much less pay. There are now more venues that offer non-superstar writers the chance to feel more "fulfilled," regardless of pay. (The Awl, The New Inquiry, countless lit blogs, etc.) That is a good thing, in my opinion. We should separate these venues in the debate from the ones like The Atlantic, for which the only reason a sane person would write for free is exposure/career development.

OK, since we're a startup I think we're not that relevant but I can give a window into the NYO budget circa 2007/2008 into 2009, before our disastrous budget cut that resulted in a massive downsizing of staff, if there's interest.

yes there's interest.

Weekly freelance budget went from 15K at its height in that time frame down to 7500. It was divided among illustrators and reviewers (these were the highest paid contributors, in the 700-1500 dollar range) to a long tail of small pieces, book reviews, etc. that would fetch in the 200-500 dollar range.

Most of the illustrators and reviewers worked every week. So, they were making a very healthy annual income. Everyone else was much more analogous to the wider freelance game. We didn't have what are called "contract writers."

The editorial budget during those years went from $3.2 million (including only base salary) down to $1.2 million. Newsroom headcount, including editors, copyeditors, and reporters, went from about 35 at its height down to about 18-20. In 2008, we got an additional $500,000 to spend purely on digital. We underspent it, because there was so much material being produced for the paper at that point of flushness, it was simpler to parse that stuff out on the web. It went into the overall freelance budget.

So I'd say the paper and website both were, by a vast majority, written by staff. But freelance rates were much higher then than the norm is now. And, I should say, we were considered to be on the low end by most writers; it wasn't always easy to get people to bite on $250 for an 800-word piece of personal essay for the Diary section, for instance.

Question for editors in the Atlantic/Gawker/Felix-Salmon-described mode of relying primarily on staff writers: What about spending some of your freelance budget on temps that you bring in for a week or a month, rather than on a per-article basis? Do you ever do that? It seems like a way to indoctrinate/train/feel out the "underleveraged talent" or whatever in a way that's more directly suited to the way you actually work.

FWIW this is a model that's fairly common in public radio.

Gawker tends to hire "underleveraged talent" as part-time contractors to cover night or weekend blogging shifts, from which they may end up becoming full-time staffers.

Yeah, Stan, I came up at Gizmodo as an intern, then the Saturday blogger, then the nighttime blogger, and then finally as a full-time writer, after like a year. But I couldn't have done that without the ability to live at home as a 22-year-old and make $800 a month for a few months.

The mention of Portfolio might remind us that a publication that pays itself out of business ends up not paying anyone at all. Better to make Slate money for 15 years than Conde money for one.

As editor of Runner's World Newswire, I would never ask a writer to work for free.

As an advertising writer, I'm often paid the equivalent of hundreds of dollars per sentence. I suppose this is because those sentences help people understand how and why to buy specific things. And, ultimately, the things I write get helped along the way by dozens or even hundreds of other people in service of a brand communication strategy and media buying.

So why don't brands just pay freelance journalism writers to do my job, for less money?

Or conversely, why wouldn't journalism outlets pay a lil more to get 'SEO troll opinion copywriters' to produce stories that get mad hits in the 'sunday styles' NYT model of journalism-as-viral-advertising? Buzzfeed..............

I guess I'm saying I want less money. And less good content.

Sorry

Here's my longer spiel: I can speak only for the budget for our online news operation, not the rest of the site.

I have a small but decent freelance budget. I like to use it on fewer, higher-quality pieces per month than several four-paragraph throwaways. The latter is done by me and two freelancers who have monthly contracts.

As a former freelancer, I try always to remember what that was like. I want good people to want to write for us and to feel that they're valued.

To Paul's point about free writing not directly serving reader's needs: should we consider writing for self-promotion an advertorial? If so, is there an ethical reason to disclose this to the reader?

@choire - So does everyone here get 10% of the gross rev? theawl.com

Oh, also, I want to be on record as saying: Writers should be paid $1 million per article.

Seconding Adrian. I want gold bullion, however.

Drew: I think ethics do require disclosure. Of course I'd LOVE to see accounting information associated with each article.

If my own site would have a bigger audience I would let the site being guest edited the time I'm not able to do it myself. Though I would pay the guest editor for sure 1/4 of the weeks money.

Black Book had the decency to sort-of fire me when their freelance budget was slashed, instead of asking for free stuff. Which I actually appreciated.

I've also had a piece "skimmed" by the Atlantic, for which I've never been paid, either by the original website OR The Atlantic. I was actually happy for the exposure, and given how far removed I was from the decision to skim it, I don't really expect to ever see a dime from it. Then again, I don't rely on my freelance money to pay the rent.

What I'm interested to know is how editors/purse-string-holders feel about the increasing transparency regarding rates that's been brought about places likes Who Pays Writers? and conversations like this. Clearly, people here are comfortable talking about rates, but it seems like some pubs would rather keep that info quiet.

I'm a scientist/engineer who blogs here artandscienceofdoingnothing.com (for the happy reward of a few hundred pages views a week). I've written a book that will be published on O/R Books. I wrote the book which is about 60K words on spec - but I love the publisher, share their politics and I'm a first time author. I want to ask this amazing panel about best approach to break in to freelancing and ultimately be able quit my day job - other than the obvious of just keep writing and rewriting.

Well, re: Chris Chafin: that's another thing here--"content partnerships" or swaps, which generally don't work in my experience, but actually do work with the Atlantic, for one reason:

When the Atlantic republishes the article, the "tweet" button on their site sends readers to the original on our site. So for every person who reads it on the Atlantic site, then tweets out the link using their button, our site is getting put in front of all their followers. In other words, we're not just getting "exposure" for the writer and the site, we are actually marketing the original article (in the real sense of the word marketing).

The original request from the Atlantic looked to me like more of a botched content-swap proposal than a solicitation for free content. In a sense, everyone who proposes a swap to us is proposing that we give them free content for exposure. But we are a publisher, of course, not a writer; so the considerations are different. The fact that the piece might have been republished on Atlantic without any involvement from Thayer at all is being forgotten (Felix, I think you pointed it out).

Re: fulfillment/exposure for unpaid work

I do both paid and unpaid freelance sports writing because I have a 9-5 so I don't need to make money off of writing to make it worth my while. With that said, I only write for free for The Classical and that decision goes well beyond the choice between fulfillment/exposure. I do find great fulfillment writing there, but the editors I've worked with made writing for free worth my while by making me a better writer and getting me paid work through their contacts.

If you're not paying, the least you can do is use your editing skills and contacts to make sure the writer is getting something that lasts longer than fulfillment or exposure.

These are two very different beasts, I know, but how this issue plays out in the world of "journalism" vs that of "literature" is really interesting to me. On one side we've got pros balking at the idea of writing for exposure, and on the other hand (at least to my understanding) exposure is more of the primary currency. There's a sense that a journalist should be able to make a living wage on their work alone, but no one seems shocked when a short story writer has to supplement her art with a nonwriting dayjob. (Does this kind of conversation even take place in "the literature world"?) Obviously I wish all writers could just live on their writing! But sometimes I do wonder if some fundamental expectation-adjustment might also be in order?

Fun fact! I totally forgot that I wrote this for free for the Atlantic back in the day: theatlantic.com -- they asked for it, I sent it in, they posted it, and never mentioned payment. I thought it was sort of hilarious that money never entered into the discussion. But hey, a few paragraphs, why not, no big deal, not worth making a point about the money. Went back to email and checked that it was as I remembered. The editor? NICHOLAS JACKSON.

Also, like most freelancers of my generation, I prefer to be paid in whiskey and sadness.

Also: as someone late of print who's now bought in to what I think of as a web-driven notion of the writer as his/her own art and PR department (at this point being a New Yorker blogger, if not yet a New Yorker staff writer, probably involves a lot of the same tasks as, like, publishing your own zine), I look at the "platform" issue from a different direction. I'm often in the position of telling writers, essentially, that their fee also requires them to be involved in promoting their piece; many seem surprised, their answers ranging from "hmm, hadn't even thought about doing that" to "wouldn't that be Untoward?" The flip side of it, I can imagine too: "wait, so not only do I get paid less but I have to do more?"

A lot to take in here. For starters, I'm proud of the fact that, at Narratively, we've paid contributors since day 1 (though I'm not proud of what we're able to pay, just five months in). We've become a forum for a type of in-depth local work that might not find a home otherwise, which is definitely valuable. But having been a freelancer myself for several years, being able to eat is valuable, too. #challenges

Rachael: I was going to say this before; in fact I ditched early efforts to be published as a poet (it was never gonna happen really) in favor of journalism in part because I realized I'd rather write and edit and think all day long than do most "day job" jobs and come home and write poetry/"creative" stuff. I fought like a demon and failed to be published for nothing, over and over again when I was doing "literature," then went into journalism.

@ paul ford

Same deal, same editor, same odd feeling

theatlantic.com

Can I just say that from a nascent-career standpoint there are different kinds of exposure. Or at least, the exposure that matters to me most is that editors read my work. It would be great to be just, you know, popular with the general world and come up that way too, but I'm not interested in writing self-published fantasy narratives. I would like to write reported journalism. The only way I will ever get to do that, it seems, is if editors like me. And are editors reading EVERY post at the Atlantic?

@Willyblackmore Writers talking to writers about how much they get paid is invariably good for the writers (and everyone should do this, without shame or hesitation). So it's possible that editors talking to editors could be _bad_ for writers: hey, we're all getting away with paying crap rates! Let's go lower! (It's also possible that those conversations could become illegal.)

Paul, I have also written for the Atlantic for free on several occasions -- but years ago when I was blogging on the side and had a day job not in journalism.

Can we talk specifically for a minute about freelance rates in "arts & culture" categories? (Maura!) I think it's all mad skewed. Book reviews tend to pay less than movie reviews, for instance, even though I think it takes much longer to read a book, and much much longer to get your arms around the whole thing analytically. This must be in part because book reviews get fewer readers. But in the transactional moment with the writer I always feel bad responding to book-review pitches by being like, "Yeah, I have maybe $75 for that?" because I know how hard it's going to be to write.

Also, some non-free content from the Atlantic: Alexis Madrigal on the issue of the day. theatlantic.com

@tomscocca Can you imagine a freelancer class action lawsuit against editors colluding to lower blogging rates? Wow.

@tmcgev - I used to have a near-ironclad rule against taking book-review assignments for that reason. I called it the "Wurtzel Rule," after the moment when I found myself two-thirds of the way through "Bitch" and realized that neither the money on the table nor the gratification of lashing out at the author in print was worth the time and discomfort of grinding through to the end. Reviewing a book takes a LOT of time and attention, and you usually get peanuts.

@Tom - I have written about music for lots of places, and in my experience, the outlet is the main determiner of pay, not the type of writing. An outlet generally pays me the same for concert reviews, album reviews, or features. So, a few hours spent listening to a record or days of interviews, transcription, and actually going in-person to things gets me the same money. Or at least that's how I remember it.

Longreads currently sets aside 30% of our Member dues to pay writers for reprint rights to their previously published stories. The catch is that the stories can't already be available free on the web.

This makes me wonder: Has free content on the web killed the secondary market for writers to shop their previously published work to others? Or was this ever a decent source of income for freelance writers?

Felix's post on this topic and some of this conversation seems to be premised on the notion that people are trying to make a living through writing for digital outlets *only*. But I dont know anyone doing this. Maybe in certain areas, like gadget reviews, this is the case, but for most writers this would be an irrational strategy (sadly). For the freelancers I know, writing online is part of a portfolio of what they do, or it's part of a strategy of building a bigger portfolio. This potential or actual portfolio includes print pieces &/or a book. For a person who is already doing $2/word features &/or a six-figure book, I think online pieces function more like writing on a personal blog, but you hitch a ride on the publication's audience.

I would add, off to the (right) side, that the market has a role to play here. There's a large category of web freelance for which there isn't much demand, but which the writer cares deeply about publishing; it can be a little self-indulgent, from a publisher's perspective, but it's also cheap. We've found that you have to pay real money -- if not Conde Nast money — for reporting out tough assignments and doing the kind of work we'd expect from staff, which isn't always a pure labor of love.

As someone who writes mainly long pieces for print and occasionally for the web, the economics and pay disparity has to be balanced with other concerns. I reported a 3000-wd piece for Outside's website on the aftermath of Sandy in the Rockaways: it wouldn't have been relevant after a two-month (or longer!) print production cycle, and I was very happy with what came out. And because of the time-sensitivity in that case, I was ok being paid less than I would be for a short book review in Outside's print edition. But I worry as we go to a fully digital model how the deeply reported, very expensive, investigative longform work gets tenably funded. Nation Institute/Pro Publica/Pulitzer Center non-profit model? Atavist profit/risk-sharing model?

@bensmith precisely. It's actually the one reason staff writers make sense. If you remember, not too long ago the gurus of online were telling us we were crazy to have headcount. But one part of this calculus that we have found is that the vast majority of our traffic is from staff-written material. It's efficient, you can strategize it better, you can focus on the reader, etc. It's active rather than passive; assigned rather than pitched. Of course, depends a lot on your business model, the editorial positioning of your site, etc.

I can dish on True/Slant's model. I don't know how it relates to what Forbes does for its non-staff blogger contributors now.

Most new writers at True/Slant got paid anywhere from $250-350/month to keep a blog for us. Note: Not to write articles for us. We had certain fluid assumptions about what "keeping a blog meant," but we didn't want people writing one big article for us and then moving on like most freelancers do.

Contributors then got paid on a performance basis - bigger traffic meant bigger bucks, mostly with a ceiling of $1000/month. We made it explicitly clear that contributors owned their writing, and could write elsewhere. We wanted True/Slant to be our writers' online home and hub for everything they did.

I would love to see a comparison of start-up EIC/CEO salaries to their freelance rates vs. established EIC/CEO salaries to their freelance rates.

Here's a Tumblr with info on who pays writers what: whopays.tumblr.com

What's gone unsaid is what kind of lifestyle freelance writers should be expecting, or are owed. When I went freelance in 2010 (getting laid off is the only sane way to become a freelancer), I a) had no idea what I was doing and b) had a target of $45k income. I was able to hit that (is it gauche to reveal how? If not, I'm happy to), but that's not operable for anybody with a family or any other significant obligation. So, should web freelancers expect more than a $45k lifestyle? Should editors be obligated to help them achieve that?

From what I've seen -- and it varies from writer to writer -- a standard Forbes blogger contract is $200/month for a minimum of 5 posts plus $0.005 for every unique visitor and $0.10 for every repeat visitor.

@carlyafisher I'd like to see a chart of freelance rates offered by Tina Brown over the past 30 years.

Also, let's point out for a moment, publications who have the nerve to stick non-competes on their freelancers when they offer such paltry rates. Has this happened to anyone else?

@ChadwickMatlin reveal how plz

I will say here that sometimes the decision to write for free or for peanut (in lieu of the professional approach, to write for peanuts plural) is one of convenience: I want to get it up and out and I don't have the time to wait for an editor to email me back. The editor I can hit up on IM who's willing to hear me out in real time is sometimes more valuable to me than the editor who is going to pay me more but get back to me with queries on my pitch tomorrow.

@carlyafisher

I had an independent contractor deal with a non-compete clause at a big sports site and ignored it as soon as they let me go. Typically, the juice isn't worth the squeeze as far as enforcing it. But yeah, it's scummy.

(as olga's non-journo bf I'm just chiming in for the hell of it. sincere, thanks to you folks who've defended her.)

The software industry went through this as the tech bubble burst, which is similar to the slow newspaper implosion now. New models came into play with free software support contracts, app stores, etc. The wise freelancers will figure out how to make their money from exposure. The magazines/sites then just need to maintain high editorial standards within budget.

I would love to see a "tip the writer" button at the end of the page so I could toss a half dollar into the pot. Then again maybe I'm the only person who donates to free software...

@Tomas It's so absurd. Is it even legal to put non-competes with independent contractors? It's such a slap in the face to people who already have to absorb their taxes as 1099 chasing $100 assignments to say you can't write for a competing publication. I just started laughing when I was offered this and was supposed to act gracious about it.

The power balance in this thread is especially fascinating as I've been noticing a growing trend of readers following writers more loyally than pubs. It's certainly not mass market yet, but among early adopters this behavior is growing steadily. Andrew Sullivan is a noticeable example of someone who's in a position to leverage this change in value before others. When it hits the mass market is dependent on the mass's tech/media adoption curve and corresponding behaviors.

Related is the risk inherent in the "moneyball" approach of developing "under leveraged" writers. Pubs will fund the development of a writer's audience only to be lose it to a larger pub with bigger pockets or if the writer embarks as an independent.

I'm waiting for the punchline about everyone here writing for Branch (& the Awl) for free.

@maxread This will be syndicated on The Awl at 5 p.m. EST.

@mariabustillos Sometimes writers ask me (ed. at Architect mag) for more money and sometimes I give them more money. I feel a little bit guilty whenever I do, like I'm playing favorites with my kids. But that's my own bullshit feeling, because some writers, Premier Writers I guess, get paid $1.50 a word over our standard $1.00 a word. I'd really rather pay everyone the same rate, plus bonuses for time or travel or special circumstances.

@max_read Already asked Choire if we get 10% of gross.

@Stan Alcorn et al: It went something like this (remember, circa 2010/2011). Fortune.com paid me $500 a piece for a business story. NYMag.com paid me $500 for a scene report, and $400 for a silly pop-culture gadget/app "column" that was really a 5-piece slideshow with buzzy copy. I was doing a Fortune column and the slideshow weekly (ish). Mix that in with mag stuff ($1.50 per at NYMag, $2 per at BizWeek, 1/4 kill fees everywhere else) and odd jobs for various web places, and you're within livable range. The Atlantic's $125 for original reporting on Charlie Sheen did not factor in much. I once got a $30 check from The Awl in the mail.

I got out of the freelance game because I was tired of the hustle, not because I was tired of the pay.

This Awl thing about how to be a freelancer really is so accurate:

@michaelroston Sponsored content!

The SBR is 60% freelancers, 30% Slate staff, and 10% shit I get for free because it is the foreword to the new edition of a book or a second serial excerpt or something.

I never ever pay more than $500 to a freelancer for a books piece. Usually I pay less. What I offer to pay a writer is based on a complicated mathematical and emotional calculation that involves
1. How much I love or think I will love the piece
2. How well I think the piece will do
3. How high-profile the writer is (though this doesn't always work the way you think; sometimes famous people don't care)
4. How little I think I can get away with paying
5. How bad I will feel about myself

6. Whether the writer has friends who I have also assigned pieces to who might tell her how much I paid them
7. Whether the writer is a fulltime freelancer as far as I can tell, or a nonprofessional writer just doing it For Love Of The Game
8. How fucked my budget is this quarter because of paying Choire $600 for the double review of the Bissell and the Lewis-Krauss

I don't like telling people how much I pay because I want to be able to lowball like crazy. That said, I don't ever mind when writers ask me for more money, as long as they don't mind when sometimes I have to say no.

Also, when I was a freelancer, the one year I felt like I really clicked was working all the time and killing myself writing blog posts and features and stuff, and I was never lacking for work, and I had movie reviews in major newspapers, my gross income was like $40K, or less than I made working in a bookstore (A BOOKSTORE!) in 1997.

@Kriston thanks for this; so interesting.

I'm just now getting to the point, around three years after going full-time, where there is enough demand for my stuff that I have to turn jobs down. Someday I hope to be forced by the sheer scale of the demand to say look, I just can't do this for less than $5/word, or whatever princely sum.

p.s. The Awl pays increasingly well. Also: unfair to judge the resources of a bootstrapped startup against those of an established business.

@dankois I think we need to sit you down with a management consultant.

@Ben Mathis-Lilley: Working for Conde, even if it's only for a year, can mean a huge jump in respectability and the amount other people are willing to pay you.

@Felix Salmon: Yes, I think the ideal scenario would be a year of Conde money AND THEN 15 years of Slate money (which will be incrementally higher because of the Conde experience)

Dan, your responses have killed my dreams.

@Maria Bustillos I don't doubt it about The Awl pay. As I said, it was a few years ago. I wasn't expecting any payment at all. Freelancers understand that editors struggle with money just as much as freelancers do. Thought counts.

@paul ford: to what degree do you think that the stuff you write online for free (or for cheap) results in you being able to sell your labor professionally elsewhere for much much greater $$?

That aforementioned crop of younger, hungrier kids coming up -- they're willing to work for far less, which prices us professionals out of the market. So, why WOULD places pay more than you have to? Much as it pains me to say -- as someone who's worked as an editor for a decade -- when your freelance budget gets slashed you feel the higher ups breathing down your neck and are forced to treat the pieces for your publication as content. It's a commodity used to get traffic to them typically and nothing more.

But I'm usually of the mind to take that limited budget and divide it up so I can pay a few talented writers far more per instead of more, less talented writers far less per piece. Regardless of the economy, quality should be protected.

Also, agreed on book reviews. They never make financial sense, unless they pay uncommonly well AND you were going to read the books in question anyway.

And SBR pieces are LOOOOONG! On the other hand, I like to think that they are the types of pieces that writers would not have the opportunity to get assigned otherwise, so maybe it's worth it? But maybe not. That's for the writer to decide, and then publish a jerky blog post making me feel like a dick about it.

It seems that Writing For The Awl for Free/Some Pay is a legitimate means of starting a career. So there is something to the 'exposure' thing. But then again, Choire actually cares about paying people and seems to want to pay them as well as he's able to.

Oh and. Noncompetes are unenforceable, and never enforced.

And! Isn't it time for @Choire to come clean on how much he's actually paying, these days? We want $s, not %s!

@Felix Salmon I think it varies. Choire has paid me $50 and $75, if I'm remembering correctly, for the last two things I wrote for The Awl.

Felix: You're right. And another issue that arises for digital startups, not quite the same as noncompetes, is the "ownership" of the published work. Also for the most part unenforceable and never enforced, but frequently you must have the documentation on hand that says you "own" the work. Banks and similar types seem to believe that unless a media biz owns its own archive it has no base value beyond revenue. It's like your factory, or your farm acreage, or whatever. This can lead to "writer's contracts" that look very draconian.

I guess I fall into the "younger, hungrier kids" crop so let me say that working for less is not a matter of willingness, but options. We lack options and thus either take what's available or go do something else. The general secrecy surrounding pay doesn't help our cause much.

From my POV, breaking into writing in any significant fashion typically requires one of these three conditions: rich parents willing to fund your dreams, a decent job that leaves enough time to write on the side or a psychotic dedication to hustling paying gigs.

Oh one other thing! I have gone over my budget for 6 consecutive quarters and eventually someone is gonna yell at me.

I've edited for a magazine that paid freelancers peanuts (though never nothing), and now a magazine that pays well (generally $2 a word). And while obviously it is better to pay well, it also means that I'm not doing as much to support young writers because the established, name-brand ones want the assignments too. On one hand, this is a good problem to have, but having been a full-time freelancer and an editor at a magazine that had to beg people to write for us for almost no money (and then fired the whole staff), it also makes me feel a bit like a sellout hypocrite.

@felixsalmon @ftrain The market isn't affected just by how much more $$$ writers get from exposure; the problem is exacerbated by how much non-professional writers earn from writing for exposure.

As a non-professional writer I have a huge incentive to write for exposure for my company and future positions. For our startup, the equivalent marketing and PR dollars from a piece are worth way more than most of the freelance rates quoted here. So for short to medium length pieces, with litter research and lots of opinion, non-writers will be always cluttering the mix. It will never replace quality work but it will drive down average prices. Hence Forbes, HuffPo, BI...

I would love to know how (if at all) the compensation model does/or should differ for infographics and the like?

@TheTomasRios Don't get me wrong. It's not a case of "us vs. them" when it comes to experienced writers vs. new writers. We're all vying for the same money and there's just far less of it to go around. I came up thanks to internships and made myself as indispensable as I could to the places I was at, which lead to paid work and even a full-time job.

The thing that really scares me, is seeing the rise of places not paying writers at all and people so hungry for experience that they'll do it. As Thayer's piece shows, it isn't just zines and smaller publications doing this. The rippling effect of what happens, perhaps, is that freelance writing will be just for exposure and nothing else. The whole profession is being devalued so so so much.

This thread assumes there's reason in freelancer pricing that can be debated but I'd humbly submit there's nothing rational about it, everyone over-obsesses. It's like gas prices.

Freelance costs are visible to lots of people in the chain of command and discretionary whereas staff salaries are fixed, automatic, and relatively hidden. I've always been surprised (as a staff writer) how cheap pubs are to freelancers relative to employees. It's the same stupidity that makes pubs skimp on computers, monitors, and chairs for employees (a fraction of a monthly salary).

It should be simple: Figure out what you're paying staffers per X then pay freelancers more since they have to pitch bill etc..

What Ryan said. The point is: PAY them.

For example, I had Fast Company take a huge infographic I made, host it on their site, sponsored as infographic of the week by UPS, without even telling me. Exposure, yeah, but still...

I just said this on Twitter so maybe it's redundant here, but I figure the most toxic part of writers--and actors and puppeteers and etc.--not getting paid is that the system is then rigged in favor of those whose parents can keep them afloat while they pursue a dream. I'm reminded of all the times I groveled to my mom/dad for rent money throughout the aughts. I'm also reminded of a friend with a lot of debt who interviewed at Vogue and discovered the pay was about $25,000/year, to work and live in NYC, and to do all the social/fashiony things expected of someone working at Vogue. Guess what kind of person ends up working at Vogue? Writing is increasingly a war of attrition to see who is going to have to quit and get a "real" job first.

@Cord true, but also we're lucky now in that it's far easier to live in other cities than New York and still find good writing jobs.

I have two contributors who write for my site for free. They're happy to do it because they like the site, what I'm trying to do etc. It's a non-profit investigative site with no funding (meaning I'm not paid yet either). It's a labour of love - they believe in the mission behind it.

However, they'd probably hold a commercial "giant" like The Atlantic to a very different standard, for obvious reasons. In short: the "right price" is what freelancers are prepared to accept. And that comes down to their perception of the site and their expectations of it.

@Lyra - To me, writing for free for a non-profit investigative site where no one makes any money isn't freelancing as much as it's volunteering. As someone who has a lot of volunteer jobs, I think there is sort of a difference between unpaid freelancing and volunteering. At least in the sense that the former involves SOMEONE getting paid.

@felixsalmon In ye olden days writing for free online (i.e. on my own blog) was a great way to get noticed. I could experiment and play and find a voice. Now it sometimes pisses people off when I write for free online, esp. if it's something about tech. I get the sense that it devalues the relationship a little so I'm more cautious.

I've been working as a freelancer since 2008, had to rely completely on that income for a while, and now am still a freelancer and I make money from multiple sources. I also run a site that started out all volunteer and still functionally is.

As a freelancer, what type of publication is asking for free work is huge. I do most of my free work at Racialicious - anything else has to offer some comp. I'm planning to write a freebie for the Billfold, but that's because I love them. Other than that, I need to get paid. I understand a lot of places aren't hugely funded, but some sites are really trying to take advantage of the young and hungry. And as Cord mentioned, a lot of folks just can't afford to work for free.

I think the problem isn't so much that people are willing to write for free (although that IS a problem and please stop doing this) but that people are willing to read what is written for free. Do pieces written for pay get a better ROI than pieces written for free? If the audience doesn't care how much the writer is paid ... why should the editor who assigns it?