Okay, now let's start a stringer rates threat...

First and most important, THANK YOU ALL for the support and letting me vent.

Now let me rant again.

I agreed to help out an old friend who needed a stringer for week 0 of high school football. Sure, why not?

Two quarters in, I'm done.

I can not work in 2019 for less than what I was getting in 1999.

My per diem for volleyball is more than most shops are offering for practicing a profession I've done since 1983.

And if you want video, it's extra. Sorry, not sorry.

I'll hang up and listen.

 

Ugh, so true.

One non-newspaper site locally pays $75 per story and box score for football. No photos, no video. Not the greatest, but not horrible, either. They pay quickly, too.

Our local Gannett shop wants you to feel fortunate when they offer $40 for a game, and then acts like they are doing you a huge favor by upping it to $50. Fuck that. Heard of a twice-weekly in the area that has offered freelancers $30 for a story, and they want photos, too. Fuck that hard.

 

15 years ago I pretty much made a living wage just stringing while looking for full-time work after a move -- local mid-sized metro, AP, papers that needed something for visiting teams, etc. Nine years ago, so not even much later, I moved back to the town I went to school and contacted all my old haunts for occasional stringer work just for the heck of it and got zero bites basically because of no budgets then.

In a way I'm actually surprised people still get paid for stringer work at all. But I'm with those that won't accept the lower pay, unless it's dire straits or something. I've been out of the business for a while but haven't written for anything on the side either. I get asked all the time why I don't write any more, for others or myself, even just for fun. Basically because I'm not going to do it for shits and giggles when I used to do it for a living.

 

We pay $75 a story and $50 a photo. I think that's OK. Not great but at least somewhat alright. Back in the 90s, I got $100 a game from the Fort Worth Star-T and Dallas Morning News for a boxscore and four to five paragraph game story. By the end of the season, counting a couple other stringing opportunities for other papers, I usually picked up about $2500 total. That extra cash paid my rent for 8 months.

 

Our local Gannett shop runs word-for-word releases from college SID releases on games they don't cover, and they accept weekly notebooks put together by the SIDs. That has replaced their stringer budget, and for free. They don't cover local pro golf tournaments, and lower-level pro tennis stops, but allow their PR people to write stories on it.

Seems shady as fuck, especially when the basketball team loses by 30, but the release has 8 grafs at the top about how Local State outscored Tech University by 4 points in the second half. Take the information, edit it and run it with a "Staff Reports" byline. But they don't have any copy editors or clerks to do that anymore.

 

What's the byline on the SID releases?

 

Varies wildly.

"State Tech Athletic Communcations"
"Podunk Daily News Reports"
"Sammy SID, Special to the Podunk Daily News"
"Sammy SID"

 

Hell, that's what we do for small college football and college baseball. If the AP only moves a brief or stem of a story I'll go to the box score, glean some color from the SID release or video highlights, grab a quote where I can, and throw together a 500-word or so gamer while working the desk.
I don't like it, but we don't have the budget to spend a couple thousand dollars a year on stringers for that. The limited budget we do have, I'd rather save for high school football games so I don't have to write four of them in a one-hour span every Friday night.

 

I'd bet we've all done that, Batman, and there's nothing wrong with using it to supplement the AP shorts and fill in holes.

I'm talking about a straight copy-and-paste of the entire release, without editing a word.

 

It's rare that I do that simply because a lot of SID copy is poorly written or in a format we can't use. One of our schools sometimes sends out surprisingly even-handed gamers and solid features, though, and I've done copy-and-paste on those with little to no editing. Just depends on the tone and quality of the story, I guess. Still, you're right in that it's more the exception than the rule, and I'd never do it blindly without at least looking it over.

 

I'm sorry, but if someone isn't putting money into the product, why should I?