How much do you pay freelancers?

I know we have paid $100-150 per story, depending on whether it was a gamer or a mid-sized feature/profile. Any newspaper paying less than $60 for the briefest of gamers ought to be ashamed. It's a minimum of four hours work, plus gas. That's about $12-13 bucks an hour...and you've got to pay the entire social security tax.

But then, what do you expect from newspaper sports sections that have thrived on paying their writers for 40 hours, and expecting 60, each week?

 

Do any of these stringer assignments pay any mileage or expenses?

 

We pay our stringers $50 a story. Not sure if that includes mileage or not. At my previous employer, a 10K, we payed $35 a story.

 

Stringers at the place where I freelanced at only got mileage if they covered game out of their home county.

Mileage was near or at the IRS rate.

 

I was paying $30 a few years ago but have recently (in the last year) upped it to $50 without my bosses saying anything about it. Granted, my writers never asked for more but I just felt their work was worth $50.

I got paid $50 per story at a big daily when I freelanced 10 years ago. I figure that rate at a medium paper now ought to be fair.

 

Some papers pay mileage if it's a significant drive. Ordinarily, though, you're just talking about paying for the fuel and then getting your IRS reimbursement for the miles.

You also have to take into consideration that a longer drive means a longer day. You might not be working in the car, but an hour drive to a football game can mean a six-hour investment. You have three hours of game, one hour of post-game scrambling to file a story and two hours of driving. I do that a lot, and it's why I started charging $60 when the price of fuel went up.

The average full-timer is going to get $100 a day plus benefits. So paying $60 to a guy with no benefits is a steal for any paper. This is particularly true if the paper can find someone with the same abilities as the full-time person.

 

I was getting $15 a game covering minor league baseball.

Of course, President Reagan had just taken office and David Lee Roth still had hair.

$50-$75 for preps, $100 for everything else.

 

My first paid story ever was for a weekly with 2,500 circulation and it paid $10. That was in 1976. I don't know about the gas; I was too young to drive.

 

You'd have made a lot more if you had followed Clemens back to his hotel room.

 

I was the SE of a 10K daily.

We paid $25 a story (publisher's rate, not mine), but I always paid mileage so the stringers would usually get $35-45, depending on how far they had to drive.

I do radio now ... I worked a one company that did all "independent contractors," paid the PBP guy $50 and all others (color, stats, et al) $25 for a game. I think they paid the board op $30-35 for a 3-hour game. We have our own company ... pay pbp, color and board ops $50 for a high school football broadcast.

 

We're a paper of 20K and we pay stringers $25 per story.

Although, we limit their amount to no more than three stories per week.

 

Oh my, that's terrible.