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| sculpture by Jeremy Mayer, photo by m. saleem |
These Tom Sawyers now come in the guise of Twitter, Facebook, Demand Media, Huffington Post, and any other central organizing platform that relies on writers’ providing them with content. And for some strange reason, we writers ask for little or no payment other than strokes to our egos: the “prestige” of writing for Huffington (now AOL—toss prestige to the wind). The “thrill” of having 10 of our friends see our work published online. The chance to imagine that we have legions of “followers,” just like Julius Caesar, or Jesus Christ. As Carr wryly notes, “Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: ‘You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.’ ”
My writing and editing career began back in 1983, when as a recent college grad I was faced with the realities of trying to earn a living in this field. One reality was that there was always someone with lower confidence and self-esteem who would do the job for less. And less was just about nothing. I remember perusing ads for NYC publishers who were paying $11,500/year for full-time editors. And that was in one of the largest cities in the world. Recent grads actually vied heavily for these jobs because I guess it seemed like the patina of a Farrar, Straus & Giroux might rub off on them by mere association. But at that wage, it was certainly only a notch up from indentured slavery. I declined the 2 ½- hour daily commute to make slightly more as a PR hack closer to home.
I later began trying to sell writing and editing on my own, and found that the terrain was similarly glum. If I asked a reasonable wage for the work I was putting in (aka legal minimum wage), I was outbid by kids who thought getting paid next to nothing was better than not working at all. People today carp about jobs being outsourced to India, and rightly so, but in those pre-outsourcing days, we writers and editors did it to ourselves. If I asserted that I should get paid $50 for a piece that had taken me 10 hours to write, they found someone who could do the same piece (at a lesser skill level, but who cares?) for $35. And on it went, until the lowest bid got the clip.
Writers have never been terribly fond of the company of other writers, and thus the idea of a writers’ union doesn’t seem all that likely. However…imagine if we as a group refused to write for nothing or next to nothing. Imagine if we made more than hairdressers straight out of beauty college. Imagine if we demanded at least half of what engineers earn for our considerable education, experience, verbal agility, intelligence, research skills, creativity, and wit.
Writing is not fun and games. For many of us, it is not a “hobby” nor a “sideline”—despite what is implied by our lack of pay. While it may be enjoyable, just as parts of any occupation can be, it’s also real work. Just ask anyone who hates to write, who’s agonized over a sentence, who has no skill at it (which is much of the world). Professional writers don’t just “talk on paper.” They spend large chunks of their lives honing and practicing their craft, taking classes, reading the work of others, getting advanced degrees, and working really hard to write sentences that have clarity, depth, precision, and grace. Real writing is the product of those who have logged countless hours creating millions of sentences and thousands of pages.
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| photo by stack |
And such writing takes time. A single well-crafted page can take hours. But somehow we’re supposed to forget about that, just slough it off, as if well, maybe we’re "overdoing it"…maybe we’re "slow"… Well, maybe. But like anything done at a high level, true craftsmanship takes time. What if online writers were not only paid, but paid by the hour? Media companies would then gain a sense of what is actually behind the content that they toss up so casually.
My brief experience writing for Demand Media came at a difficult moment in my career and life. I was broke and my self-esteem was on empty. I thought that maybe, just maybe I could type fast enough that I could somehow research, write, and edit a short article for 15 bucks, and that if I stacked enough of them together, might be able to earn a chunk toward my rent. But the aptly named Demand seemed to derive great hubris from the fact that they, yes, demanded!, ever so much from the writer, and gave back very little. (Despite the claims of their paid sycophants.) This included demanding that the writer adhere to extensive editorial guidelines, which seemed to multiply like Oregon mushrooms after a storm. And just when you’d absorbed the guidelines and produced something you knew they couldn’t reject in one fell swoop (which often happens, and means not getting paid after doing copious research)…one of their ridiculous copy editors would object that you had not followed the intent of the article and insist on a rewrite. Not that Demand ever provided the article thesis up front—this was subject to interpretation based on one scrap of info: the article title. And forget about that half-day’s work if your interpretation didn’t jive with some that of some 18-year-old kid whose editorial experience was likely limited to editing his own tweets.
All this for 15 bucks. Or not.
Associated Content is actually less profitable than Demand. You may (or may not) be offered an initial payment for a piece you wish to publish. This is generally less than $5. You also accrue royalties according to how frequently the article is viewed. But this stacks up to very, very little unless you’ve written a wildly popular article. Even the 2 quite popular articles I wrote (thousands of page views) netted me less than I spend of a bag of groceries. The whole system is vanity driven. And for all those wannabe writers, age 14, who have never seen their work “in print,” this might be an OK deal. But for professionals like me, we might as well toss 28 years of experience into the landfill.
Companies such as Demand and HuffPo take advantage of people who don’t think enough of themselves to demand reasonable, if not good, compensation. They realize that, on the whole, writers are self-effacing depressives who value their work at far less than it’s actually worth. And because this mindset has become so entrenched, it has become impossible to form a union and strike for fair wages.
Carr’s article cites the case of Mayhill Fowler, who won a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her HuffPo reportage of the 2008 Obama campaign. Presumably that nod would turn the head of someone like Arianna Huffington, herself an experienced writer. But almost 3 years later, Fowler has yet to receive one dime from Huffington for her work.
Writers need to start acknowledging that others are getting rich from our work. HuffPo was just sold to AOL for a staggering $315 million. If you write for them, what was your cut of that? Or were you just happy to “build your brand”? Gack. A platform is just a grid; we are the ones without whom zero ads would be sold. Writers are the backbone of all print media, and we deserve to be paid fairly for the long hours we log. While yes, it’s fun to see things in print and brag to our friends, it’s also rewarding to be able to pay our bills and put food on our tables. If enough of us refuse to work without pay, the industry will be forced to look at how exploitative its practices really are.
