Tonight, IGN announced it was “looking for new freelancers to assist with the daily flow of stories in games, entertainment, tech, and science.” Its base rate with a “sliding scale for heavier reporting” is $20 per article. That sliding scale apparently goes from $50 “for slightly more involved stories” up to $300 and beyond for “in-depth multi-source reporting.” While I commend IGN for releasing its pay before Writers of Color dropped into the editor who got sacrificed to announce this’s replies[1]the media in-joke here is simply that any time a writing job gets posted to Twitter, Writers of Color pops in to ask how much the pay is, and they do so honestly because shit like this is so … Continue reading, uh, are you fucking kidding me, dudes?
IGN makes tens of millions of dollars a year. Not exorbitant amounts of money by any means but quite a bit more than some of their much smaller competitors. They have a large, international staff who does good work and they have been dominant for so long in the games space because they have a large freelance base to pull from. And I have always heard that their pay rate wasn’t great but always with the caveat that “they’re better than the content mills.” Content mills usually pay $20/article or less for a bunch of stories written at once that are usually lazy rehashes of press releases or other sites’ stories filtered through a game of Telephone. The worst content mills “pay in exposure.” But IGN: not a content mill! They were, for better or worse, a “legitimate” site.
I don’t know what the fuck this is, though. It’s not “legitimate” to ask writers to write a fuckload of articles in a short time frame and only pay them $20 an article. If you can’t afford to hire a bunch of freelancers and pay them in any way appropriately – like, fuck’s sake, even $50 a post? even that seems lowballed – you shouldn’t be hiring freelancers. It is exploitative to do this and pretend there’s no problem here, specifically and especially coming from a website like IGN. Smaller websites pay writers more already, the problem is that they can’t do this at scale in the way a website like IGN could and the ability to actually maintain that level of integrity is so much more fucking precarious than IGN has. I mean hell, you have websites like DEEP-HELL paying $100 for stories. Uppercut Crit was paying $50 last year and has upgraded their rates to $125 per piece after the successful completion of their goddamn crowdfunding campaign. Bullet Points pays better, Paste pays better, Polygon pays wayyyy better, and – I don’t know, man. This is fucked. For the whole industry.
“uh but what about the upper limits of that sliding scale!”
Yeah what about them? This is targeting a specific kind of freelancer, the kind of freelancer who maybe doesn’t have a big portfolio to swing around, whose experience level or number of connections is maybe not super high, who is trying to get into writing but maybe doesn’t know quite how to do so – not actual journalists writing a whole bunch of “in depth multi-source (lmfao) reporting.” The target here is writers who haven’t seen or heard of Into the Spine or Haywire Magazine or any number of other, better, less-exploitative resources for new writers, new writers who are looking to make a buck without understanding any of the traps this industry as a fucking whole has laid for people just like them. Nobody with a secure pitch schedule is taking this deal. Nobody who is writing regularly for some of the other sites in this industry is going to hop into the editor’s inbox tomorrow like “what’s up I’m ready to be roasted alive for my wordsmithing abilities.” So what about that $50 for “slightly more involved” articles? What about that lofty $300+?
This is why groups like Study Hall, Writers of Color and the Industrial Workers of the World Freelance Journalists Union exist. If you were considering doing this gig please check out these resources instead. For your health, for the profession’s health, and for fuck’s sake, everybody’s dignity.
There is nothing in the world worth less right now than a gig at a company who can’t/won’t pay you more than $20 an article, except for maybe NFTs.
References
| ↑1 | the media in-joke here is simply that any time a writing job gets posted to Twitter, Writers of Color pops in to ask how much the pay is, and they do so honestly because shit like this is so prevalent and writers of color tend to get paid worse and less punctually |
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