Legitimate Patch.com question

If you're making $50 to cover a college football game, you're earning somewhere between $5 and $9 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.

You must really love college football.

 

If I'm not doing anything on a Saturday, then sure. If I expect to keep the lights on and the rent paid with it, then no.

What is a reasonable wage to pay a freelancer?

 

I won't write for anything less than $100 anymore. If I don't get any gigs because of that stance, so be it.

 

As cheap as the company can get away with it, which they're accomplishing quite well.

The question is what is a reasonable wage that a freelancer should expect. And as long as there are people willing to work for those rates, there's really no reason to think anyone will be able to make a living wage in the news industry of the future.

 

Very true- and I definitely wasn't trying to present the slow payments as a worst case scenario. I did a story for a mid size regional daily that was in the paper on March 17, and about 20 emails and a few phone calls later, I'm still waiting on payment. But when I'm working for a low rate, like w/ Patch, for example, I take more exception to having to devote a lot of time to the payment follow ups.

 

I usually go for 50-75. The majority of my work is done close by, so I get stuff down in under four hours- if that.

 

A lot of this depends on where you're located. If I were in Arkansas, maybe $50-$75 to cover an event that takes 4-5 hours all told wouldn't be so horrible. I'm in D.C. where the cost of living is huge, yet sites like Patch are still paying $50-$70 to cover a game because there are enough kids living at mom's house or people who have nothing better to do who are willing to work for that price.

 

What is Patch paying its local editors? We don't have a Patch site anywhere near where I'm at -- we've got a local paper and a crappy online-only news service. I was always curious what Patch pays and if they're offering contracts for people. Any idea?

 

Just so y'all know, for work that isn't in the media industry -- tech or marketing writing, copy-editing white papers, writing features for corporate websites, things like that -- $40-50 an hour would be a bottom-end rate for something like that, and $100 an hour isn't all that uncommon once you've been in it for a while.

As I said, you guys must really love college football.

 

Don't forget the free food in the press box!

 

LTL's right on this one. I got $100 to cover an NIT game for the Baltimore Sun ... in 1991. A lot of things have changed since then. Freelance rates haven't. That's criminal. Newspapers are stealing your work.

 

You can write a story for $50.

Or, you can proctor the ACT (involves reading directions and make sure nobody cheats) for at least twice that.