Stringer blues

Or maybe paying people like you would like doesn't make economic sense. I don't see how increasing the costs of operating a business is beneficial to employing people.

 

Because by being forced to pay hourly wages instead of a freelance rate, employers are now no longer able to try to guilt reporters into accepting ridiculously low rates for a story.

A reporter will spend at least 5 hours on a Friday night covering a high school football game. There are still shops out there paying $25 for that. That's $5 an hour, sub minimum wage. You can make more than $10 an hour working at a lot of retail places.

It's time for the industry to stop lowballing the help and paying better. It's not the 80s anymore.

 

I cannot like this enough. Attacking a business by outlawing the economic and legal premises that makes it viable is futile. There is no benefit to anyone.

 

If someones not punching a clock (ie in the office) how do you know how long it takes to do anything? Negotiate a price for your feature or gamer that’s worth it. If its $5/hour, dont take it.

Outlaw per story pay and make people part time hourly employees. Stringer A covers a 7 pm game and files 45 minutes late at 11, gets paid for 4 hours. Stringer B covers a different 7 pm game, files by 10. Gets paid for 3. Did a better job, gets paid less.

 

By devaluing the worth of content creators, news organizations have kept overall pay ridiculously low in this industry. Either you accept the low freelance rates, or you don't work in journalism. Either you accept the pitiful salary and benefits, or you don't get a full-time job in news. I'm sick and tired of being told that's what the market dictates when other industries are willing to be more aggressive to keep employees with more competitive pay.

Journalists are more likely to make less than their PR peers (The growing pay gap between journalism and public relations) and the gap is growing.

If you're living in the Bay Area and want to work as a freelancer because you like the flexibility, you have options. You can pit news outlets against each other to try and get a better rate and you have the freedom to walk away from a bad deal. That's not the case for many aspiring journalists in college towns and smaller cities throughout the nation. As more newspapers cut staffs or close completely, there are fewer options. Which means the freelancer can't shop around and is stuck either accepting a shitty rate or not working in the industry at all.

If you are contributing more than three articles per month to a single outlet, you deserve the labor protections and other benefits typically awarded to part-time and full-time employees. Places like Vox and SBNation will never value writers. That's why they should be shunned, with support going to those outlets who are willing to treat contributors fairly.

We've hit a breaking point in this industry. A handful of corporations own most of the news outlets in this country. If journalists are going to protect themselves and their financial well-being, there needs to be a push to unionize in newsrooms across the country and to support better pay and treatment of freelancers and part-timers. Simply accepting what the market dictates without trying to enact change is what got us here in the first place.

 

No one is expecting a miracle cure, but unions have a clear impact on wages for those both inside and outside of the organization.

From a 2016 study by the Economic Policy Institute:

Union decline has exacerbated wage inequality in the United States by dampening the pay of nonunion workers as well as by eroding the share of workers directly benefitting from unionization. Earlier research (Western and Rosenfeld 2011) shows that union erosion can explain about one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men and about one-fifth of the growth of wage inequality among women from 1972 to 2007. At least for middle-wage men, the impact of the erosion of unions on the wages of both union and nonunion workers is likely the largest single factor underlying wage stagnation and wage inequality.

Union decline lowers wages of nonunion workers: The overlooked reason why wages are stuck and inequality is growing

 

What if requiring that from companies make the contributions economically unfeasible?

 

If the difference between turning someone from a freelancer into part-time help is going to put a company under, then the company has bigger issues and is likely dead in the water anyway.

 

Also, let's be real here.

We're not talking about the longtime former columnist who still writes a weekly Sunday piece for shits and giggles or the weekly outdoors column a paper keeps around to appease older readers.

Yes, those people will be affected by this bill.

The peoe we're really talking about are the situations where companies bring on a freelancer, have them do 40 hours worth of work a week during a season, but refuse to bring them on full-time. Shops around the country have guys who work every Friday night at a football game, maybe do a small college game Saturday while the staffer is at Local D1 game, and do a couple stories during the week.

How many beat writers did SBNation claim to have? Look at the byline count for some of those people, all while Vox/SB pockets the ad revenue those stories generated.

I keep hearing that the world is conditioned to no longer pay for news, so the money isn't there to pay journalists. Bullshit. The world paid for news for over a century. You couldn't get a newspaper in the world without forking over a penny, a nickel, a quarter, or eventually a $1.50.

The world can be conditioned again to pay for news. Just have to have the balls to do it.

 

Another big factor, SoloFlyer, is newspapers could care less about quality anymore, particularly with photos.

Not that long ago, I could pick up some easy stringer money just by being able to shoot decent (not great) action shots and good reaction/celebration shots when state tournaments were held in my area. Sports editors and reporters could talk to coaches and players from afar by phone, and often get decent stats or play-by-play of state championship games online, but no art to go with that.

In recent years, many SEs are content to use parent cell phone and/or Facebook pics of the team or athlete with a trophy. (And cell phone cameras keep getting better and better)

As newsroom personnel and stringer budgets remain in a downward spiral, submitted content — no matter how crappy — becomes the choice for many newspapers.