What's a typical pay for freelance work on a single game?

Newsroom employees likely say the same thing. Raise your hand if you've received a raise during the past five years. I'm looking for those hands.

 

I've done stringing assignments for $35 before and been quite fine with that. The money's nice, but it's really more because I love covering games that I do it. That's especially true now that I've taken a job outside of journalism. I'm not ready to give up the high school football sidelines on Friday nights. As long as I'm actually making something, I'll take it.

 

First, I can relate to this now. Second, when I freelanced (fresh out of college) for a large metro I got around $100. When I freelanced for a weekly or a podunk paper I got around $35 to $50. But I was less concerned with making a living and more concerned with getting clips and improving my writing.

Today, I think I'd still take that. I have a steady job and would be on the sidelines/press box for the love of journalism and not to pay my rent and eat food.

 

There can be tons of variables. Sometimes a sports editor gets word he has to slash the stringer budget for the rest of the quarter and won't offer as much.

A couple of years ago I did some work for one of the big South Florida papers. They usually sent two beat writers on the road with Miami Hurricanes football, but one of the beat writers got moved over to help on the Heat so they called me up to do a sidebar and get a few quotes for the gamer. If I remember right I got $150 for that. That spring Miami was in town for a relatively important ACC baseball game and I couldn't get them to pay $95 for the gamer.

If you really want it to be lucrative, double and triple up as much as you can. See if you can cover it for papers covering each team. I covered a NCAA baseball regional a while back and was covering all four teams for three different papers. I made a pretty decent chunk of change that weekend.

I used to ask for high school football assignments from the biggest daily in the area where I knew I could also write a story for the local weekly. That can turn a night when you might have made $30 to $50 into one where you can make as much as $90. You might even be able to convince one or both papers to let you write a feature or notebook or something as a followup. I had decent luck with that because I regularly strung for a paper that was short-handed when it came to prep writers and the non-revenue sports at the local college.

Prove you will always write something usable with heavy editing and hit your deadlines and they'll let you do more and you can eventually ask for a raise.

 

Before you double up (or more), you'd better be damned sure you can make all your deadlines, make sure all the outlets know what you are doing and are OK with it. If you plan to use the same story (or one with minimal variations) for more than one outlet, you'd better have that approved in advance. A lot of places don't want you to do that.

I have on several occasions covered more than one team at a tournament and I have always been very clear and up front about what teams I'm covering and what times they play, and the logistics of how everything will get done. At a basketball tournament this year, I covered two teams that ended up playing against each other, but it was an afternoon game so deadline was not a big issue and it worked out well.

Just be careful when doing the multiple outlet thing. It's real easy for that to blow up in your face.

 

That's all true, but I've never turned the same story in to more than one outlet and I've never had a sports editor who cared if I was working for another paper as long as they got their own story on time. I'm good on deadline though, I know how to have multiple versions of a gamer going as the game goes along.

You don't want to take on more than you can handle.

 

Very true. It's easier for someone to double up when it's their only source of income, but if you're just doing this on the side, you'd better be really good at time management to try to pull off something like that.

 

Nope. Just a significant pay cut and several rounds of furloughs.

 

Quit taking shitty pay for four hours at a high school game or a full day on the road for a college game. Ask for a fair rate based on your time, experience and what is being asked. If they don't match it, move on.

And expand your horizons, make calls, network, start looking around. This is the truth — "You know where the real money is now? Corporate. I get $1 a word from a major tech company for cranking out 500-word rah-rah features for its internal online newsletter."

 

Very true. This is something I always talk out before accepting freelance assignments. Some papers are fine with it and others are not. My normal policy is the first paper to call gets me and anything on top of that is gravy. However, I won't accept non-compete arrangements, so I might be working for one outlet on Friday and someone else on Sunday.

 

I'm planning the same strategy. Whoever has the first offer, that's who I'll work for that day.