Pay rate for stringers

How much does your paper pay a stringer for a basic eight-to-10 inch high school football story? The reason I ask is that I need to discuss with the publisher hiring a stringer or stringers to cover high school football (and possibly other sports) and wanted to learn what is the industry standard in 2010.

I would like to pay $50. Is that too low?

 

we pay $50 per story, unless it's an out of the way location up state or in another state in which case we bump it up to $75.

 

Stringer rates are more often dictated by a pre-set freelance budget at the particular paper than by what the general going rate is, or what you would like to pay.

 

We rarely use them, and it used to be $50. I think we dropped it to $40 in the last year or so. But it's a former intern who went back to school and could use the cash, so he doesn't care too much.

 

We pay $50 per story, and we're about a 25K paper.

Of course, we also rarely use stringers. Usually just for downstate state finals in track, wrestling, etc.

 

I'd never ask someone to work for less than $75, and certainly wouldn't do so myself ... you pay for what you get ... especially on those Friday night deadlines ...

 

$50-$75 for preps, $100 for college and arena ball

 

When I was stringing I got anywhere between $30 to $100 from different organizations.

The $100 per article place was a major metro of course, but some small shops paid $75, while larger shops paid less. I suppose there will always be some kid dumb enough to jump on that $30 story like I did when I was in college.

 

Our pay scale varies. for stringers who are calling in, it's about $30-35. we pay about $40-50 for prep gamers.
I'd pay more, but I'd exhaust my budget by march if i gave everybody a raise.

 

I've been freelancing full time lately, so I take just about any assignment I can get, and it varies a lot from paper to paper. The place I string for the most pays $40 per story, which I think is pretty low for a 25,000 circ in a college town. The weekly down the road pays $30. Last week I got $125 a game to cover college baseball for a 200,000 circ metro. NCAA.com pays $150 per day to cover an event.

 

I've written for papers which pay as low as $25 per story and for papers which pay $75, plus, in one case, reimbursed me for a hotel room because a snowstorm kept me from getting home. To back up Jake's comment about NCAA.com (courtesy of Sports Media Exchange), I covered the men's golf championship two weeks ago and the pay was $150 a day for two stories.