If I paid my bills as slowly as many news organizations pay their freelancers, I’d be homeless, have a deactivated cell phone, and carry a credit score of about three. Many news organizations are quick to snatch up good freelance news items but often negligently slow to pay the promised fee.
A newspaper in Abu Dhabi recently took over four months to settle the balances it owed me. Four. Freaking. Months. And I’m not talking about a $25 blogging fee here. They owed me five hundred bucks, and one of the pieces I filed for this publication I put together in about five hours. I got the newspaper a story in half a day, and it took them a football season to pay up. One magazine in Amman, Jordan took so long to pay me I had completely forgotten they owed me money. When I finally got paid, it was a Christmas-like experience, like finding $20 in a pair of slacks.
In my experience, U.S. news organizations aren’t any better at paying writers on time than publications abroad—even those in developing countries. I can’t remember exactly how many weeks one large national magazine based in Washington, D.C. took to pay me for a piece I wrote in 2010, but let’s just say it’s a good thing I wasn’t pressed to settle any gambling debts.
I know my experience is not every journalist’s, but I’ve freelanced for over forty publications over the last seven years, and what I’ve seen is that, more often than not, weeks after my work is published I have to contact the editor I worked with and ask where my money is. Then, I typically wait anywhere from four more weeks to three and a half months to get paid. As I write this, three news organizations owe me a total of $770, payments which are weeks to four months late.
I have a journalist friend who was laid off in 2008 from her job as an editor at a prominent magazine in New York, and picked up some freelance work to try and keep fiscal body and soul together. Ha. One well known national magazine took thirteen months to pay her, and she received the money long after she’d secured a new full time gig.
I won’t name the publications that have taken ages to pay me, as my point here isn’t to bite the hands that feed me four months late, but rather to highlight an injustice that self-proclaimed defenders of justice commit on a regular basis.
If I wait three months after the deadline to pay my subscription fee for Time magazine, it stops showing up. Likewise, publishers shouldn’t take liberty withholding money they owe freelancers. I’m frequently reluctant to pitch story ideas to publications that I have to fight with for payment and to whom paying me isn’t a priority, and I know other freelancers who feel the same. The magazine that took thirteen months to pay my journo friend will never see my work.
I know that most editors are viciously overworked, and slowness in paying contributors is very often unintentional. I can sympathize with this. News organizations need clear guidelines and time frames for processing freelance payments after publication. I’ve heard speculation, though, that some financially pressed publications deliberately withhold freelancers’ payments until they complain, like health insurance companies praying patients will forget to submit claims. Man, would I love a leaked reference to this policy in a careless publisher’s e-mail.
Journalism is a business of deadlines, and news organizations should pay workers on time so they can meet their financial deadlines, too. A few publications have paid me on time and deserve recognition. The Christian Science Monitor has been pretty good, and for a handful of dispatches I filed for GlobalPost, I was usually paid in the same month. (What celerity!). CJR pays me for each bundle of five or so columns I write, but they’re consistent and it works fine.
The last thing I did was an interview for a book. The check is supposedly just now being cut--after eighteen months!
#1 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Fri 23 Sep 2011 at 01:23 PM
Well, this is a little awkward in a pot-kettle kinda way. And I recently wrote a proifle for a university mag that paid $1 a word (hello,1979) and paid inside a month.
#2 Posted by Steve Daley, CJR on Sat 24 Sep 2011 at 11:57 AM
Getting paid to bitch about getting paid?
Sounds like a great alternative to working for a living.
Good work if you can get it, I suppose.
#3 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sat 24 Sep 2011 at 01:49 PM
Actually, padikiller, I wasn't bitching about getting paid, but rather about *not* getting paid. Your language was imprecise. Perhaps this is why you don't get paid for it.
#4 Posted by Justin Martin, CJR on Sat 24 Sep 2011 at 05:55 PM
Justin - Respectfully, do a littlle reporting, inside and out. Contractors don't get paid because there's a rule in the US of A tjhat says you don't even have to think about paying people before 30 days. It's called Accounts Payable. Journalism is just part of it - call a speechwriter or a solo PR person
#5 Posted by Steve Daley, CJR on Sat 24 Sep 2011 at 06:26 PM
As a matter of fact, Justin, I bill $285 an hour for writing and I do a lot of it.
True professionals have a solution to the problem of slow payment..
It's called a retainer. Why don't you simply demand a retainer?
Or simply suck it up and wait for the check?
#6 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sat 24 Sep 2011 at 06:42 PM
@SteveDaily: If news organizations waited 30 days and then processed fees for freelancers, that would be wonderful, and I wouldn't have written this column. Unfortunately, they don't.
Padikiller: Congratulations on your wealth. If you're an attorney, calling yourself a writer may be a bit of a stretch. Attorneys get paid $285 an hour to read and interpret the tortuous writing of other attorneys.
#7 Posted by Justin, CJR on Sat 24 Sep 2011 at 07:08 PM
It's Daley, thanks.. And they don't pay in 30 days at CJR. I was trying to be nice about this.
#8 Posted by Steve Daley, CJR on Sun 25 Sep 2011 at 09:27 AM
You may be right, @Daley, but CJR is a non-profit publication and its payments are processed by a university. Universities are slow in paying for just about everything.
#9 Posted by Justin, CJR on Sun 25 Sep 2011 at 11:22 AM
Good points but as a reporter why the surprise at working for one's self and getting paid as a freelancer. Maybe you should have looked into it and reported on it rather then have been surprised by the fact.
There is your next story line.
#10 Posted by Johnson, CJR on Sun 25 Sep 2011 at 01:14 PM
Happy to end this here but 1) that is a mighty lame excuse and more than little smug. And 2) if you look at my first posting in this thread, I mention a university magazine and its payment policy. Accounts Payable is Accounts Payable, my friend. Good luck with the column....
#11 Posted by Steve Daley, CJR on Sun 25 Sep 2011 at 02:01 PM
Justin responded : I wasn't bitching about getting paid, but rather about *not* getting paid
padikiller replies: Where? Your article complains of slow payment, not non-payment. Perhaps your imprecision is responsible for these slow payments.
Think?
If $770 is driving this whiny screed.... You need a new profession. My seventeen year-old makes more than this in two weeks working at Subway.
A lot less whining and a little more sandwich artistry would pay you more, save CJR some money and help make the world a healthier place.
Eat fresh!
#12 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 25 Sep 2011 at 07:02 PM
Slow payment of freelancers is a big issue if you write for LIVING, as opposed to Internet trolls who publish their ignorant screeds as a hobby. I've had wire services and national mags take as much as 6 months to pay. Often, I got the assignments and delivered them on such short notice that the contracts hadn't even been mailed by the deadline for the story. A $2,500 assignment is great, but it would be nice to know when the check is coming.
I think the biggest problem is that most of these places have a payment policy, but either lie or ignore it -- and that is the main issue for freelancers. Editors give you the policy, knowing full well that their accounts payable dept. is dragging it out by weeks or months. So take a national magazine, working months in advance, which tells you their policy is pay within 30 days of publication. Then, as I found out, the policy is the editors SUBMIT your invoice 30 days after publication. It's another 6 weeks to get a check processed and mailed. That is just lying, plain and simple.
There are such things as retainers, but it's called being a contract writer who gets a regular check. Nice work if you can get it, and become a contributing writer or editor to a publication, but that's not how freelance operates. And, of course, once you've got your story submitted, you lose all leverage.
One trend that makes it much worse, and just encourages slow pay, is that big publications get all kinds of writers submitting for reasons other than making a living. Authors, celebrities and others who write for the publicity can afford to wait a year to get paid, and may not miss the money. But those pieces of puffery aren't real journalism, either. That's left to the freelancer, who gets strung along waiting for the check to arrive.
#13 Posted by Brian O'Connor, CJR on Mon 26 Sep 2011 at 02:09 PM
Now $2500 is something a little different.
You're starting to get into money that's worth bitching about.
But we're talking about $770 here.
The interest on $770 for six months (at 3%) is less than 12 bucks.
Stop the damned presses!
12 bucks isn't the worth the energy wasted in griping about it.
#14 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 26 Sep 2011 at 09:31 PM
Way to be a troll, padikiller.
#15 Posted by Lex, CJR on Tue 27 Sep 2011 at 02:28 AM
@ Brian O'Connor: Great point about celebrities or PR folks who submit freelance work to publications and aren't concerned with, or even interested in, getting paid. That's a dimension I hadn't considered when penning this piece.
#16 Posted by Justin, CJR on Tue 27 Sep 2011 at 06:39 AM
I freelance and I teach a class in freelancing, I totally warn my students about this. My boyfriend always argue that I should get paid within two weeks like a paycheck, but he is learning to live with the 45 Net billing now. We should probably get together and start up a news version of paymentpractices.net, which is for translators. I always check that site before accepting freelance translating gigs, and I have turned down agencies with poor ratings on that site.
#17 Posted by Lene Johansen, CJR on Tue 27 Sep 2011 at 11:37 AM
Lene Johansen, I love the idea of a payment practices website for freelancers. I got paid within two weeks on each of my last two news freelance pieces (one for a for-profit and the other for a non-profit). So it's possible for news organizations, at least some of them, to be speedy.
#18 Posted by S, CJR on Tue 27 Sep 2011 at 03:51 PM
I have to agree that some publishers are slow in paying. September 30 of 2011, I submitted 7 articles with photos and they ran weekly on page 1 of the second section of the paper. The date today is January 26, 2012, and I haven't seen any payment yet. I'm not in need of the money at this time and have actually given them 12 more articles with photos, knowing that it would probably take a while. The paper in question is a local one that is part of a much larger publishing company, so it's not like they don't have the money to spend. I will wait to see how long it takes for these 3 invoices to be paid and I'll try to report back here when they are.
#19 Posted by Bob, CJR on Thu 26 Jan 2012 at 09:56 PM