A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013
Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional services for an article they sought to publish after reading my story “25 Years of Slam Dunk Diplomacy: Rodman trip comes after 25 years of basketball diplomacy between U.S. and North Korea” here http://www.nknews.org/2013/03/slam-dunk-diplomacy/ at NKNews.org
From the Atlantic Magazine:
On Mar 4, 2013 3:27 PM, “olga khazan” <okhazan@theatlantic.com> wrote:
Hi there — I’m the global editor for the Atlantic, and I’m trying to reach Nate Thayer to see if he’d be interested in repurposing his recent basketball diplomacy post on our site.
Could someone connect me with him, please?
thanks,
Olga Khazan
okhazan@theatlantic.com
From the head of NK News, who originally published the piece this morning:
Hi that piece is copy right to NK News, so please engage us mutually.
Thanks, tad
From the Atlantic:
Sure. Thanks Nate and Tad…I was just wondering if you’d be interested in adapting a version of that for the Atlantic. Let me know if you’d be interested.
thanks,
Olga
From me:
Hi Olga:
Give me a shout at 443 205 9162 in D.C. and I’d be delighted to see whether we can work something out.
Best,
Nate Thayer
From the Atlantic:
Sure, I’ll call you in a few minutes.
After a brief phone call where no specifics were really discussed, and she requested I email her:
Hi Olga: What did you have in mind for length, storyline, deadline, and fees for the basketball diplomacy piece. Or any other specifics. I think we can work something out, but I want to make sure I have the time to do it properly to meet your deadline, so give me a shout back when you have the earliest chance.
best,
Nate Thayer
From the Atlantic:
Thanks for responding. Maybe by the end of the week? 1,200 words? We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month. I understand if that’s not a workable arrangement for you, I just wanted to see if you were interested.
Thanks so much again for your time. A great piece!
From me:
Thanks Olga:
I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children. I know several people who write for the Atlantic who of course get paid. I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts. 1200 words by the end of the week would be fine, and I can assure you it would be well received, but not for free. Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them. Let me know if you have perhaps mispoken.
best,
Nate
From the Atlantic:
Hi Nate — I completely understand your position, but our rate even for original, reported stories is $100. I am out of freelance money right now, I enjoyed your post, and I thought you’d be willing to summarize it for posting for a wider audience without doing any additional legwork. Some journalists use our platform as a way to gain more exposure for whatever professional goals they might have, but that’s not right for everyone and it’s of course perfectly reasonable to decline.
Thank you and I’m sorry to have offended you.
Best,
Olga
From me:
Hi Olga: No offense taken and no worries. I am sure you are aware of the changing, deteriorating condition of our profession and the difficulty for serious journalists to make a living through their work resulting in the decline of the quality of news in general. Ironically, a few years back I was offered a staff job with the Atlantic to write 6 articles a year for a retainer of $125,000, with the right to publish elsewhere in addition. The then editor, Michael Kelly, was killed while we were both in Iraq, and we both, as it were, moved on to different places. I don’t have a problem with exposure but I do with paying my bills.
I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired. If you ever are interested in a quality story on North Korea and wiling to pay for it, please do give me a shout. I do enjoy reading what you put out, although I remain befuddled as to how that particular business model would be sustainable to either journalism and ultimately the owners and stockholders of the Atlantic.
I understand your dilemma and it really is nothing personal, I assure you, and I wish you the best of luck.
So now, for those of you remained unclear on the state of journalism in 2013, you no longer are…..
Reblogged this on Clitemnistra.
interesting developments – is journalism degrading and how fast? @CoMissourian, @nate_thayer vs @TheAtlantic and more (1/6) via @urbanmolecule https://twitter.com/urbanmolecule/status/319166619467272192
I’m so glad someone finally posted something like this so that we can see the BS that now populates “for profit” news agencies, magazines, and newspapers. Our going rate is 100.00? That may be true but that’s bullshit. We are out of freelance money? Bullshit. If that’s true, you need to shut down the magazine right now. You have no idea how to run a business if your company doesn’t have an account especially for great reporters that deserve to be paid for their craft. Or, the Atlantic should just invite random people from the street to submit their iPhone pics and texted stories. We’ll now call that journalism. Also, close down all the journalism schools at colleges, or just rename them. Imagine getting your Bachelor’s degree from ASU’s new “School for Blogging, Camera Apps, and Texting.” It used to be the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism but then realized it was training people in obsolete skills.
‘Or, the Atlantic should just invite random people from the street to submit their iPhone pics and texted stories. We’ll now call that journalism’.
Or call it crowd sourcing, or whatever you want to label, it’s effective – people seem to enjoy reading it, and it’s cheap.
I guess you haven’t seen the increasing number of video “viewer contributions” on local TV stations, along with social media and other on-line content re-purposed in the traditional media.
My local paper regularly re-prints articles from Salon.
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox
and now each time a comment is added I get four e-mails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove me from that service?
Thanks!
Dear Madelaine:
I just received your message that you are receiving four duplicate messages whenever someone makes a comment on this thread. That sounds like it would be a veritable nightmare as the thread has had 800+ comments to this post.
I have no idea why it would be doing so and have heard no other similar complaints.
I am a computer Luddite and, of course, don’t control who gets notified when new comments are made. I think those who comment choose that option. I will try and figure out how to disable it for you. Let me know if it continues to happen.
it might be that, as in addition to the 800+ I think all legitimate comments left, I noticed that a near equal amount were caught by the WordPress spam filter as various spammers trying to comment to direct traffic to their sites for the usual reasons spammers do such things, and diverted to the spam box and never reached the comments thread. But the spam filter might not have caught all of them. I will go back through the thread and try and delete any obvious spammers.
This particular thread went viral with more than 300,000 readers coming and reading the post for reasons still beyond me; obviously it resonated for whatever reason.
Regardless, accept my apologies and I will try and figure out what button or gizmo will remove you from the notification box. Perhaps WordPress has an answer? if you run across it please send me a message.
In general, I never delete a comment regardless of how goofy it might be based on whether I agree etc as a matter of principle, so I haven’t even read many of them. But if it happening to others like it seems to be with you, that is mortifying. I will post a note on the comments thread asking if that is the case.
let me know if the problem continues.
Best,
Nate
I had a similar experience in the higher education sector recently. Yes, the business models of formerly proud institutions in education and journalism are broken. This is obvious when the creators of what is taught or published are expected to do it for the love of it.
It’s actually very complicated in this busy life to listen news on Television, therefore I simply use web for that reason, and take the most up-to-date news.
I hope journalism doesn’t go the way of the music business, but it seems it’s heading that direction. I am a musician and just got an offer from a blog to review my new album if I paid them $15. Not just advertising–which I’m OK to pay for–but a supposedly unbiased review! I politely declined, and got a response along the lines of “these days, this is how it is.” This is total hack journalism and needs to stop. I understand the writers need to get paid, but the publication needs to pay them, not the artist! Such a sad state of things. I’ve also read about this happening with self-published novelists and writers eager to get good press.
Blogs and magazines make money on advertising and subscriptions and should always pay for the contributions of their writers. Working for free or paying for exposure is just perpetuating a disrespect for art and the work that goes into creating something great.
That’s not hack journalism, and it’s not journalism of any sort, period. It would be bribery if it WAS journalism, but it’s simply pay-for-advertorial, and it’s unethical in the extreme.
Back in the early 90s, I bootstrapped my own video magazine and picked interesting products to cover. At least 1/3 of our potential interviewees asked if we were going to charge them for being featured! I happened to remark to my wife the other day that I might have seen that as a sign to ditch the journalism and simply make videos for money; there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but there is when you’re appearing to be an unbiased news source.
You might also be interested in doing an online search for some of the allegations against Yelp.
Many young travel bloggers ask not only for the free trip etc but also for money to ‘deliver’ their readership (which on paper, or is that virtual paper?) can be quite considerable.
I don’t think these bloggers claim to ‘be’ anything, they are simply offering an advertising service.
Blogs make very little revenue any other way,
It was Awesome reading this… I recently bought a story to my editor which could get the paper and the people evolved to a global platform… my story was denied cause the editor and others nobody had the guts to follow it up. What was shocking was they even ignored the facts. It is heart-breaking to see responsible journalism dying.
Responsible journalism died decades ago when reporters became “journalists”.
I think we might be able to look for ward to a renaissance starting in August or so after the Koch brothers take over the LA Times, Chicago Tribune et al.
I am hoping for their success in both taking over the papers and bringing reporting back to the US.
Yes, I am a liberal (libertarian if you prefer) and a huge Koch brothers fan.
John Henry
Unless the Kochs channel William Allen White, what exactly are you expecting? This is a company a decade ago, when
i was a working paid reporter, that when it was tagged for alleged massive environmental law violations for how it managed an oil refinery and pipeline operation, started a massive public relations campaign, declaring it to be the environmental company, chock full of photographs from recently acquired ranchlands.