Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here.
With the rise of content farms such as Demand Media and Examiner, and the recent AOL/Huffington Post merger, there has been a lot of talk about how much writers are being paid online. On the farms, the only way for writers or copy editors to get high pay is to work very fast — likely with poor results. And Huffington Post and many other group blogs rely on an army of contributors who aren’t paid at all.
So how has the web affected the pay rates for writers now? There are more places to write, but perhaps less pay at these places. And what about the premium that some sites are paying for veteran journalists, with the war for talent breaking out between Newsweek/Daily Beast and AOL/Huffington Post? While more people are making less online, there’s still a chance for the best writers to build their own brand, their own platform, and do pretty well.
Yesterday, we convened a group of writers to do a live chat on Twitter at the #writerpay hashtag. Below is a slightly edited reworking of that discussion using Storify. Share your thoughts in the comments if you’d like to add to the discussion.
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.
Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here.