My first journalism job was for an online outlet that was a start-up. They brought me on offering to make me an employee, but that somehow never materialized. I was only ever a contractor. With that they paid well at the beginning, but never regularly. Over time hours kept getting reduced, until it just wasn't viable for a single mom wit…
My first journalism job was for an online outlet that was a start-up. They brought me on offering to make me an employee, but that somehow never materialized. I was only ever a contractor. With that they paid well at the beginning, but never regularly. Over time hours kept getting reduced, until it just wasn't viable for a single mom with two kids and a mortgage. I got cover stories for local papers, which in the end paid less than $5 an hour. I pitched solid stories to various outlets that got polite rejections and then were the center of their reporting less than a year later. I applied for the Managing Editor of a local online paper, but had to back out when I found out that they were only offering $26K a year, clearly expecting that some faculty spouse at the local university would be able to take it as some kind of hobby/pin money, because their tenured spouse would be bringing in the "real" bucks.
Substack provides me the platform to write well about what I care about, and I trust that the audience is out there. I'd rather bust my ass to build that audience and feel like I'm in control of my own livelihood than hustle and scrape for scraps from folks who consider me expendable and want me to only write what is going to generate revenue for them without ever passing that along to me as the actual writer of that revenue-generating content.
My first journalism job was for an online outlet that was a start-up. They brought me on offering to make me an employee, but that somehow never materialized. I was only ever a contractor. With that they paid well at the beginning, but never regularly. Over time hours kept getting reduced, until it just wasn't viable for a single mom with two kids and a mortgage. I got cover stories for local papers, which in the end paid less than $5 an hour. I pitched solid stories to various outlets that got polite rejections and then were the center of their reporting less than a year later. I applied for the Managing Editor of a local online paper, but had to back out when I found out that they were only offering $26K a year, clearly expecting that some faculty spouse at the local university would be able to take it as some kind of hobby/pin money, because their tenured spouse would be bringing in the "real" bucks.
Substack provides me the platform to write well about what I care about, and I trust that the audience is out there. I'd rather bust my ass to build that audience and feel like I'm in control of my own livelihood than hustle and scrape for scraps from folks who consider me expendable and want me to only write what is going to generate revenue for them without ever passing that along to me as the actual writer of that revenue-generating content.