Write for Free: A Bleak Little Manifesto

Putting the "free" back in freelancing

Imagine that you’re a struggling freelance journalist and you get a big break — a high-profile publication, the Prestige Times, has accepted a pitch of yours! It will pay $400 for a 1,200-word story, which seems like a fair rate to you, especially because having this high-profile byline to your name will enhance your reputation and portfolio. If this story performs well, maybe you’ll be able to write more for the Prestige Times.

Very quickly, you will find out that this big break is a kind of trap.

On the surface the pay seems reasonable. And if you can spend just 10 hours writing the story you’ll make $40 an hour, which isn’t bad. But when you factor in the time required to write and send pitch emails, the time spent making revisions or prodding editors to respond to your revisions, the research and reporting that might be involved, the follow-up effort it sometimes takes to actually get paid — add that all up, and you’ll have devoted a lot more than 10 hours to this project. Maybe more like 20, which means Prestige Times is paying you less per hour than the starting wage at the burger place down the street from me.

And beyond the hourly rate, you’ll likely find it difficult to pay your rent on these $400 checks. Write 100 of those Prestige Times joints a year (a very productive year), and congrats, you’ve replicated the salary of a burger flipper. Bump your rate up to $500 a piece and 100 stories will net you $50,000, pre-tax, barely a living wage, especially if you have to buy health insurance.

The point of this exercise is to show you that the economics of writing for money are unfathomably awful. Being a full-time freelance writer generally entails actual poverty, a supportive family or partner who acts as your patron, or eking out a living wage in a strange, non-publicized corner of the industry. For me, this has meant “sponsored content,” which is basically advertising that doesn’t quite look like advertising. I’ve interviewed bands for shoe companies, written guides to cities I’ve never stepped foot in for a canned Paloma brand, and once edited some stories about the UN for a project funded by big tobacco. Any writer who’s been around the block at least once has done these kinds of jobs and omitted them from their resume; actual journalism for name-brand publications is no way to make a living.

At best, writing those prestige stories gives you a chance to get a staff job at a publication when one opens up, though these jobs are scarce, and to get one you’re competing against a hundred other qualified, underemployed journalists. And a staff job is no guarantee of stability at a time when many publications are becoming leaner and more focused on the bottom line. The only way off the treadmill is to become famous enough to attract fans willing to pay you for your podcasts, articles, and whatever else constitutes your “brand,” or else ascend to management, so that when the next cycle of cuts comes, you’ll be the one sitting in the Google Hangout telling writers and editors about their severance packages.

If the last few years have seemed like dull ones in journalism, with few fresh voices and fewer new publications of any note, it’s easy to explain why. Everyone is exhausted and burned out. Everyone is writing and editing, consciously or unconsciously, in a defensive crouch. Everyone is feeling constrained by low pay and cramped budgets that preclude ambitious work — how many writers regularly get to go on paid reporting trips? For that matter, how many editors are actually training up the young freelancers who land in their inbox? How many of us can conceive of a career path that has a logical upward trajectory?

The only solution I can see at the moment is to ditch the whole “career” thing altogether. Lose the idea of pitching editors or writing for clients, skip the concerns over SEO or traffic or post counts — write something and give it away for free.

In the early 2010s, when Twitter was just evolving into a place for writers to talk shop and talk shit, I remember a recurring debate over whether you should write for free. The savvy people at the time said that of course you shouldn’t, writing was labor and in order to make employers value your labor, you need to value your labor first.

That logic made sense to me at the time, but now? The value of writing as labor has cratered across the board. The ladder that used to lead from freelancing to a stable newsroom gig is disintegrating even as the current generation of young writers — sorry guys — tries to climb it. And I find myself in the middle of that disintegrating ladder, a bad place to be, even metaphorically.

I personally do not need to scrape together $200 checks to make rent. What I need is a little bit of freedom, a little space to jot ideas down that is unsullied by the demands of the market, which as discussed is pretty awful right now. I need to try things, because I’m tired of not trying things.

In vulgar terms: I’m relaunching this blog. It’ll mainly be about journalism and writing and politics, since those are the things I have been thinking about and working inside of for a decade and a half. But more importantly, it will be an escape for the whole writing-for-money trap.

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