WTF: Freelance Writing Rates Haven't Changed in 30 Years

They're worse now TBH

Photo by Amelia Spink on Unsplash

When I started freelancing for music magazines in 1993, a lot of them paid 10 cents a word for album reviews, interviews and features, and that rate was considered the low floor of acceptability. A few hipster titles offered a whole quarter per word and then laid low when it was time to come collecting on the invoice. And “prestige” titles like Rolling Stone paid considerably more — I think I got 50 cents a word for the few albums I covered there in 1996.

On the upper end, publications at Condé Nast paid between one and two dollars per word, unless you were Carrie Bradshaw, who famously boasted on Sex and the City that she got four dollars a word at Vogue. I got to hit that still-rarefied rate of one dollar a word a few times in 1998, when CN acquired Wired. Back then, I reviewed CDs for the tech mag and got to nominate the worst ones, like 90210 star Brian Austin Green’s rap album, to be the “Microwave ‘o the Month.”

However, when I got some assignments from CN publications Pitchfork and Teen Vogue in 2016 and 2017, I don’t believe that I got anywhere near a dollar per word. Even now, publications that pay the equivalent of 10 to 25 cents per word are incredibly common, and dollar a word joints are still unicorns. The truth is that it is even worse now — I’ve seen calls for pitches for publications that offer under a penny per word. You can’t even cut a penny!

(Above rate spotted on Indeed.com)

Yes, paying something is better than paying nothing, and I’m not here to rate-shame independent outlets that are sincerely doing their best. That disdain is better directed to the many “work for exposure” sharks who are still out there.

I just thought I would point out that freelance writing rates haven’t changed much in a really, reeeeealllly long time.

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