MEDIA OUTLETS: PAY THE WRITERS!
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
April 19, 2023
Admittedly, I was parked where I shouldn’t have. When I came back to my car, someone – astonishingly and somewhat humorously -- had placed four-foot-high baskets of huge rocks in front of and in back of my car. Rocka my soul!
Luckily, I wasn’t stoned at the time, because it proved to be a feeble attempt to box me in. Those unknown stoners didn’t know who they were dealin’ with. I’m from Brooklyn motherjumper! We can deftly get in and out of any spot this side of any johnny pump from Kings Highway to Coney.
Whoever the masked mason was, they/him/she/them left about a foot of space on either end of the vehicle. It’s all that was required. I got out of that spot with two turns of the wheel, and in a jumpin’ jack flash.
After extricating as fast as Jack Robinson (on Jackie Robinson Day, coincidentally), I had hoped to see the boxer-inner in my rearview. I wanted so badly to flash a finger salute. Upon further reflection, I wouldn’t have, because I realized the boulder foofaraw served as the perfect metaphor as an attempt to curtail another or to stifle one’s dignity. Albeit I was in the wrong, parking where I did, But, no one was going to hold this flack down or fence me in.
This anecdote is to tell you of a post I saw from a website called ProBlogger.com, a blog aggregator. This is a job listing: “Freelance Writer for Cooking/Food/Recipes Website”
“Are you passionate about the culinary arts? Do you spend your work week fantasizing about all the amazing meals you're going to prepare on your days off? Do your friends and family think of you as the next-best thing to a gourmet chef? Also, do you enjoy writing and blogging? And most importantly, are you able to translate your flair for cooking into prose that others enjoy reading? …”
Here’s the kicker:
“Competitive freelance rates: 5 cents per word (bolding mine). Consistent workload every week: 5 articles per week.”
Yeah baby, sign me up. I have the three years experience you require and I’m ready for that workload. Which means I’ll be able to pay for about three cans of crushed tomatoes with which I can cook all the recipes you want.
But if you think I’m picking on ProBlogger, I’m only sighting it as an example of how writers are treated and boxed-in, if you will. They get paid the least, they get paid the last, and they hardly get no respect.
I’m addressing this – because of my own more than three-decades as a wine journalist. Now, I mainly focus on my winery media consultancy. But I serve two constituencies: my winery clients and the media, with whom I work as I try to secure third-party reportage for the former.
I’m all about media – writers, journalists, bloggers, podcasters. As evidence, please refer to the “About” page on this site. Therein, I’ve delineated many of the media members with whom I’ve engaged over the years for my clients.
I respect the media. I defend the media. I advocate for the media. At the same time that their numbers dwindle – due in part to media companies such as ProBlogger which has the audacity to keep paying my media colleagues a non-sustainable wage -- just to allow ProBlogger the opposite.
But there’s no keeping us down, baby. We keep comin’. We keep reporting, we keep tellin’ the truth. In the end, as hard as we work, we make you work just as hard, if not more so.
Think how much effort it must have taken for that person who allegorically threw rocks at me just for the act of parking where I shouldn’t. The poor soul likely used a forklift to load the baskets of boulders, maneuver it to the front of my car and then another to the back, in what turned out to be an idle attempt to hem me in.
I set myself free, with little effort, and likely more quickly than it probably took for that person to get her/his rocks off.