SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

I've said too much about money earlier in this thread, but that's nuts.

 

What if it was your fault?

 

It's a shorter meeting.

 

The level of navel gazing over shit so few people read is craZEE.

They can't pay 5K per piece, folks. It's a blog site. And a peripheral one at that.

BLOGS !

Sorry, couldn't help.. Throwback reference.

The sexism toward Bergeron ("climber") isn't a surprise... It's the latent shit that happens on calls, email and texts in male-dominated fields still very much today.

In fact you could argue the virtualness of the workplace is the ideal Petri dish for that particular strain of sexism.

 

Vox, which owns SB Nation, has a valuation north of $850 million. I'd like to be that peripheral.

Vox Media becomes a startup “unicorn” with NBCU funding

 

Sorry for the double post, but speaking to Luggy's point about pay—why can't online sites worth that much pay for features? Why is the expectation that they can't or won't? They're worth more than lots of legacy outlets that pay living wages to writers. I don't get why the default for online words is that they're worth less than words in ink. The writer did the same work to write them.

 

I think in part because writers will take $1,500.

If you're Jeff Arnold and you've been a freelancer much of your career and you want to write a longer feature, and you're not on staff somewhere, that $1,500 or $2,000 seems like a lot of money. SB Nation realized they could pay that because people would take it. And it's a lot of money to a lot of people. Sure, the quality might suffer (and I think there is a lot if evidence to suggest it did suffer at SBN with some youngish writers trying to break in to that level of writing) but why would they change when they were getting lots of praise? Again, the cycle became self-fulfilling.

1. Pay not much to writers wanting a break
2. Don't have time to give stories a great edit
3. Stories run and are praised anyway, even selected for BASW
4. Assume this model is great
5. Start again at Step 1

I might say: I won't do this story for less than $3000

There will always be someone who will say: Wow, you fucking snob, I'll do that story for $2,700 and be thrilled

And plenty of people who will say: "YGBFKM, I'll do that story for $1,000 and I will be thrilled. Live in the real world, dude."

At some point, SBN had to say "Ok, if I pick the writer who wants $2700, it's worth it. I'll fight for that decision." But that point never came. And why would it? The $1000 writer gets lots of praise anyway, even if the story is a mess, ("It was selected by Longform.org!") and it seems like a great deal.

 

I'd guess it was bc print was the only game in town for a while, so there was a premium on getting into the relatively exclusive space of print publications. Once the Internet came along and you could conceivably print as much as you wanted, the value divide was established and it hasn't really changed. Also is a story that runs on the front of ESPN.com going to get as many eyeballs as, say, a feature in Esquire with its 750,000 reader base? I'd be interested to know how many clicks, say, a Simmons column used to get.

 

I get taking less to break in. My first year in newspapers, I made $15,000. I wrote my first story for Esquire, 2,500 words, for $1,000. They were taking a chance on me, and I didn't want them not to take that chance because of money. So I can hardly criticize young writers for doing the same. But at some point, either your operation floats entirely on the backs of young writers and you take whatever risks that implies, or you pay something more reasonable and get, I'm guessing, better quality work, at least on average.

I mean, say SB Nation paid $5,000 a feature, which is what city magazines might pay for a 5,000-word piece. That's $250,000 a year for 50 weeks worth of material. That seems like a bargain to me, considering I know mag writers who earn that salary and more for four pieces a year. A billion-dollar joint should be able to afford that, unless the system is more fucked than I even imagine it is.

 

We had stories at Esquire that more than a million people read online, and our site sometimes sucked. I'm guessing ESPN muscles far more than that for some pieces.

 

I mean, it's definitely fucked. But to what degree is a matter of perspective. I think the web complicates the prestige game, because now we know that "You Will Weep and You'll Know Why" might get 150,000 clicks, and "17 Zesty Ways Ole Miss Flaunts the Rules" might get 200,000 hits, and one of them cost $1,600 and the other cost $300, then some head exec at Vox needs to understand why one is worth that much more. I don't know that they care.

 

I guess this is where you get into weird metrics about whether a click is a click, or is time spent worth more (it seems like it should be), in which case good features make sense. The other factor here, cross-threading the Gawker stuff, is that the more you pay, and the more professional your writers and system, the less likely you are to get sued into oblivion for some amateur mistake. You'd think that insurance would be worth something, too. I mean, like you say, if someone will do it for less, why not pay less, but that's the risk.