If You Want To Be A Nonfiction Writer, Maybe Spend Your Twenties Mostly Doing Something Else?
It’s an awful time to try to make a living being a writer, and there are upsides to pursuing nontraditional routes
Once in a while someone asks me about how young people should break into journalism. I’m both qualified and unqualified to answer the question.
Qualified: I make a good living doing this.
Unqualified: I was born on third base to parents with graduate degrees. This means I had access to top-flight educational and other resources; the sorts of professional and social networks that are crucial if you want to carve out a place in journalism; second chances during my (many) adolescent and young-adult periods of laziness and relative dysfunction; and the ability to do un- and low-paid internships until I found a job.
So yeah, take anything I say about this with a grain of salt unless you come from similar circumstances. But I do have almost two decades of experience in journalism at this point, and I do feel invested in the question of how we are going to produce future generations of good, thoughtful writers — let’s broaden this to include both journalists and other forms of nonfiction writers — especially ones who didn’t come from the Newtons and Shaker Heights of the world. So I’ve got some thoughts on the question.
The short answer (of course) is that if it is important for you to make a significant amount of money to support yourself and/or a family you already have or intend to have soon, you shouldn’t pursue journalism or other forms of nonfiction writing. It’s a short answer but it’s the only correct one. I could not in good conscience say anything else. That out of the way, if you can delay your attempt to break into writing a bit, there might be some interesting options available to you.
I’ll explain what I mean shortly. But first, let’s be clear about just how bleak the scene is. I’m writing this partly because I recently read this piece in Digiday by Sara Guaglione and found it very depressing. It’s about the collapse of the market for freelance journalism.
Freelance journalists say rates from large national publications haven’t changed in years — and they’ve had to take on more work, or supplement their income with other pursuits, according to conversations with six freelancers.
Typically, freelance journalists are paid around $0.50 to $1 a word, they told Digiday. But that rate hasn’t changed, despite rising inflation and cost of living. (The U.S. inflation rate from January 2020 to January 2024 increased by 22%, according to inflation tracker Truflation.)
“If I was paid $1,000 for a story in January 2020, I should be making almost $1,200 for that same story today. But I’m not. Rates aren’t rising at all to keep up with inflation,” said Kate Morgan, who has written for publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her rates haven’t changed since she became a freelancer in 2015, she said.
I agree that it would be nice for payment rates to rise with inflation, but it makes sense that they don’t, because inflation also means the effective costs of all sorts of expenses rise for the outlets themselves. You can see how “Let’s increase rates for an ever-increasing pool of desperate freelancers who might work for literal peanuts” might not be a popular or tenable-seeming opinion within a given outlet.
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