I write a column for the local paper. 600 words, every other week. So far I've written 15 articles. I have been paid $0.00. FWIW.

That's good work if you can find it!

At some point when I care enough I'll need to understand the economics involved here - Who was buying Vanity Fair even back then, because the demographic described in this screen shot is tiny. Was there an advertising model that allowed vast income without vast readership?

Say you always blew all your money on coke or something but you had, on a coke-binged lark, bought some blue chip stock with the paycheck for one article back in say 1995. That > one article < would be worth almost $2 million right now $2 million in retirement, per article, over a 25 year career.

more shocking: Say, over this 25 year career, you blew 2/3 of your inflated income on that coke. Say you just invested the paycheck from one article per year in the stock market, and that stopped 10 years ago. Right now you're worth $10 million in cash for just one article per year! #boomermath

How many of these rich assholes on coke helped fuel the drug industry while some poor schmo went to jail or died of overdose

His shoes are worth about $2K (one tenth of an article) when you add in the coke they were either living paycheck to paycheck, or they're all very rich ex-writers now, or both

(sorry got the math wrong, $2K shoes are only about 1% of one article, not 10%. he prob had several backup pairs)

My father. And he doesn’t fit the description so…I don’t understand either.

There were all the aspiring glass tinkers and tiny dog ladies. And big glossy adds designed by Don Draper, bought by GE and Phillip Morris. Plenty of money.

Mad Men describes a world that actually existed, although it almost seems more alien than something like Game of Thrones, more made-up. Mad Men is truly one of the great series, and yes it shows these people living inside the start of that world.

Not all but many things are right on. I grew up in that era. I read an article by someone who actually did work in Madison Ave advertising in mid 20th century who claimed it wasn't like that. Not sure I believe him. Liquid lunches were definitely a thing, I'm sure the sexism was over the top.

The millennial mind can't comprehend. 😫 (I'm a millennial)

I’m not saying I am rooting for Chat GPT to take jobs…. but I can save Vanity Fair some money if they wanna slide into my DMs.

tell us the cameras you'd get if nyt remunerated you so handsomely

Whoa! I will make this happen. Graaaaaaar!!!

Ad dollars. Magazine heyday was pre-internet plus he was a media darling. Still seems ridiculous!!

The ideologues of the old era were very well paid!

Is that... adjusted for inflation, or...

yeah , i mean annie leibowitz is a great photographer, but she is so famous because she just shot celebrities.

i always felt like vanity fair was an upscale people magazine or even national enquirer. maybe that's unreasonably harsh, and pop culture is worth covering, but for sure, that's where the money is, as evidenced by the ads for tony stuff that loaded up these types of mags.

I can't help but think that if there's a magazine writer who was getting six figures an article and paid $2/word, it's deeply weird that I don't recognize their name, that I've never seen their writing discussed. Some of that must just be my tastes. But writing that valuable should be more visible?

Herman Melville made $1200 writing Moby Dick.

He is well-known and has written impressive books. But it shows how quickly the limelight fades.

Vanity Fair was owned by Condé Naste publications. So was The New Yorker. The New Yorker paid Joseph Mitchell from 1964-1996, despite Mitchell having nothing published during that period.

What the fuck is right lol

Holy crap.

If I was paid almost half a million dollars to write 30,000 words, I would be making a bajillionty dollars on Bluesky. Manifesting.

Same. After 10 years? I'd find an island and Y'all would never see my black ass again.

I would just phone that shit in, buy my friends houses, pay off everyone's bills, and take VF to the fucking cleaners.

🤣🤣🤣

it’s was over once they learned a whole bunch of us are willing to do this shit for fun

Last place I pitched pays $50ish

Nice work if you can get it. Obviously from the 'Ms Parker and Her Vicious Circle' era. When words, and the thoughts behind them, really mattered. Ahh,,, Thats just me being cynical. Words and thoughts still matter. Just not to enough of us I'm afraid.

Back around 2000-01, my j-school professor co-hosted a party at a Vanity Fair writer's house on the UWS, and I was like wowwww, to be a magazine writer.

What

How... do I...

answer: time machine

omg wtf

Heydeeho.

The longer the words in the article, the more he got paid clearly. They or else its product placement by a thesaurus publisher.

Literally just staggering amounts of welfare for rich people. Which I wouldn’t mind but nobody else gets it.

Protest at Heritage Foundation!! #WEARETHEFLOOD youtu.be/A69GtWE5OU4?...

"Writers these days are so entitled, they won't even write for exposure. That's why we need AI to shit out badly written articles that are completely unassociated with anything to do with reality"

Is $16.60/word not the standard rate today?

I can still remember the perfume when you opened the latest issue. Stayed on your fingers even. Kinda gross.

Yea, but read Barbarians At The Gate …

Bullseye! For the perfect cinematic companion piece, watch Robert Altman’s Prêt-a-Porter. Linda Hunt is magnificent 👻😎😈😍

Ah, the golden era of journalism

Not making ya feel good at this point eh Jamelle?

Sure beats a penny a word

There's no way to know the number of hours of research, travel, interviews, etc. that went into each one. It looks outrageous at first glance, but may not be.

It's outrageous no matter how many glances you feel the need to make.

there is no permutation of facts that makes it not outrageous

What killed journalism? Long, pretentious articles about fuck all, written by hacks on expense accounts with an editor obsessed by celebrity jottings over content. Boris Johnson, for example, some cunts think he’s a journalist.

Wordy Could use an editor

I read it all and it was amazing. Took me back a couple decades and last decade and remembering life back then. I loved that kind of journalism.

And he wrote a shitty book about the 60s Left that probably got him paid just as well

So 16 bucks a word is a lot?

I’m angry just from that.

The Gilded Age, Trump‘s new golden age. He wants to go back to all that crap. Not for all of us just for his people.

White men really exist in a different realm.

Those days are over.

The job people think academics have

Holy shit

Those are trump charity director figures/hours

there were a lot of ads in those magazines.

At the same time I and many others worked at Condé Nast for less than 166k a year as computer programmers and they had unpaid interns.

Ugh he's living the dream: highly paid and hardly any work

Hell, I'll write 3 essays a year for half a million dollars

HOW

Here I was feeling pleased this week that an indie paid me $500 flat rate for a project

(That’s not a knock on them, this was incredibly generous for their budget)

My head is exploding because what?

You would need a new house to have space for all the suits.

As someone who writes over 10k words a week for work, I am going to vomit if I do the math on the ratio my earnings are to that.

Boomer writers: “kids these days blow their expense account money on Starbucks lattes and iPhones, that’s why they can’t afford yachts and vacation homes”

I wish I would have realized my words were this golden. All of my life I've been told I am a writer...a very good writer. That ship has now sailed....at least for the big bucks. My security would have been so different. Today I am elderly and poor...in the true sense of the word.

I knew I should have stuck with journalism. I'd be finishing up my 30th year now and obviously with some 10.5M in the bank 😜

When companies make a lot of profit, the money flows. You should've seen the money in the golden era of multicams! 💸💸💸

It used to flow you mean. Now they keep it all at the top.

Lol, no.

not sure what you’re disagreeing with. you’re saying journalists and tv writers didn’t used to make more than they do now? they did. and journalists kept money from movie sales and from syndication and reprints.

TV writers are making more than they ever have. Shonda Rhimes has a $450m dollar deal. Ryan Murphy has a $300m deal. And there were tons of smaller overall deals, but the writers got greedy, struck and the studio cancelled them. Great job writers!!

those are just two o0f the biggest producers with multiple hit shows. most writers are struggling.

They would've been struggling more ten years ago because they wouldn't've been able to break into the industry.

What? They both started working in the late 90s. Grey’s Anatomy began in 2005. Shonda had three major hit shows before that deal. Murphy had nine. Don’t understand what you’re actually trying to say.

Not Shonda and Ryan, the other ones you're complaining about. THOSE are the one who wouldn't be working ten years ago. 🙄

Imagine getting all that money just to write three stories a year and still end up looking like total shit.

Don't forget the car service, food, and brow services

There is a very specific kind of person who's a fantastic writer but you can see the personality disorder peeking out over top of the writing lolololol

No fucking way!

I once got paid an advance of, say, less than 1/100th of that, for writing a well-received novel that took over 5 years to write and earned back its advance in the first six months.

same

so are you saying you make less than that???

significantly

Like 15% less right?

well if it was up to me, you'd get that $166k per story, although that's a good indication of why it will never be up to me

The media in the 90s was awash with money. I remember my late journalist father pitching a story to a UK Sunday newspaper that resulted in a £75000 payment plus expenses cover to Australia from Scotland to interview and photograph. Would never happen now.

there used to be money for things 😭

I'm currently rethinking my career...

Depressing to read this piece as a young media reporter who's only ever seen this industry from the POV of, as Burrough puts it: "Practically every publication without a rich benefactor is in danger of shuttering".

I would do one story and live better than I do now

You do 2 and I'm hitting Louise up to know when our families are going to the south of France on vacation together

you know, we *should* live in a timeline where great witty writers vacation in the south of France while flabby, cosplaying-genius, drug-addicted Nazis go to jail

My husband typically makes 3-400 dollars a script of 1500 words doing freelance writing for YouTube channels… WTF

I don't know how many articles I wrote over my 2 decades as a freelance writer, but I do know that I got paid *pennies* per word, so this makes me want to throw things.

This world makes sense to me, it’s the human world that doesn’t hold sanity. Even being a white male with university degree doesn’t mean I can afford this economy. And forget the silly myth of retirement.

we got into this line of work at the wrong damn time lol

Probably Israeli

I made $14.28 from my original songs streaming on the big platforms.

Oh, so he was making Unclear & Present Danger podcast 💲 😁

"People just don't want to work any more."

The time correspondent in France got put up in a free villa in Paris, had an entertainment budget, and had to file copy four times annually in the 60s. Four.

Really was the profession of Kings, once upon a time, should you have been so lucky to be accepted among the elite.

My Kouign-amann budget would be legendary in such a scenario.

Line items like “Gauloises: $10,000”

"help, my industry is dying"

Also I have lung cancer and I can hear my liver crying at night

This was the "don't even bother asking the hotel to put your bar bill down as 'laundry,' nobody's checking anyway" era and I would have been SO GOOD AT IT.

Remember, we had no internet or social media. These magazines WERE the zeitgeist.

Relatedly, one of the most short-fingered vulgarians I ever knew refused to read Vanity Fair or Spy because “too much text; not enough pictures.”

I would love to know the ad card for VF and other top-tier mags during those years because the numbers somehow worked… until they didn’t. (“Half of the money we spend on advertising is wasted, we just don’t know which half”, etc.)

$16.60/word is pretty amazing…

sex and the city blinking meme, and it was outlandish the fantasy she would get paid that for vogue, or her small new york city not even the big three paper

*eternal scream*

This is true. I used to be Ingrid Sichy’s assistant and she got paid tens of thousands of dollars to write drivel twice a year in 1997. I edited her drivel to make it make sense and got zero.

There is no more thankless job than editing a big-name "writer."

The CIA must have been subsidising this.

Well now I just feel old because this isn’t even a little bit shocking to me 🫠

Maybe I’m woefully ignorant of the magazine industry, but the $20,000 he’s still getting for a 10k article sounds insane given how little even established novelists get from the big 5 publishers for a 100k+ word book.

Fun fact: We can expect maybe a $35k advance for that, which typically is all we ever see from the book.

Yeah, I still get a little sad when I tell people I made almost as much money for a 1000 word blog post as I made for a 180k word novel.

Fun read

$166 / word sounds like a reasonable rate

That's almost exactly what I charge. (⏫️ There's another $990 in my pocket (bluesky can have the parentheticals for free this time. They know where to send the check)

Making 3k more a year by eliminating all apostrophes from my articles

Three thousand

WTF!

Great story

Is this real?????

This is the kind of thing that kills job markets, just sayin.

OK it’s an insane amount of $, but I wish writers/musicians could still make a lot instead of all the money going to a few ppl at the top of tech companies and PE firms. It wasn’t excessive writers’ salaries that killed the industry. It was Google, etc. If VF paid him that much, it’s cuz they could.

must a been a hell of a story..ies...!

😲

Absolutely 0 surprise

I think we need throw more money at tech bros who make apps that track my dog's menstrual cycle not at fussy magazines with writers who say "paradigm" a lot

Ed Coaster!

Maybe the articles cured cancer?

Vanity, indeed

Man, think of the per word rate!

I’ve written three thousand movie reviews on Letterboxd for free

"Today I’m lucky to receive two dollars a word"

I wonder what they paid Hitchens for that ‘Women aren’t funny’ piece way back…

A classic

Stuff like this is what makes people hate the media. They're under the mistaken impression that we're all "elites" living like this.

every era there are places in the sewer system we call the economy where the money by coincidence clogs up one of the pipes and some white dude gets a mad paycheck

listen, he and Maureen Orth (who I’m sure got paid way less), among others, did some good work, but that kind of salary is obscene

❗

Nearly half a million dollars? Shoot, I'd write ten great stories a year for that much. Ba-dum-bum!

Can I show this to the cheapskates that don't want to pay me $1,800 to write technical white papers?

It was bonkers when a newspaper would own a sports team. Not saying there weren't tons of problems but giving all of that ad money to social media and Google was not better.

I used to feed this guy!

Back in the early 2000s, I was getting paid $1/word by a mid-level national publication. My articles ran 1,500-2,500 words. Huffington Post came in with their oooh-we'll-give-you-internet-exposure-if-you-write-for-free model and killed that career.

Did that pay model ever affect your editing? as in geez, if I leave that unnecessary 500 words in I can buy those speakers guilt-free (or make rent) ;)

Fair question. It did on my first assignment. I was a young, single, 24/7 mom and that writing gig was a life changer. My editor, however, was a former WaPo editor, and she got me in line to ensure I submitted quality over quantity in exchange for consistent assignments.

The industry was half dead even before Huffington Post. When I shadowed a news journalist in high school, they wrote one article (between 300 and 750 words) a day. When I worked as a journalist, I had to do at least three times as much. The freelance rate was 1.40 ZAR a word. (Less that 1 cent US.)

I just wrote about 10-12 pages at work and for that I’ll get about $1,000 and half my health insurance paid for.