Pay rate for stringers

We're a pretty small shop but will pay $75 for 20-inch high school football gamers. Rarely need stringers for other stuff.

 

At my old shop, we paid $15 per story. One guy talked his way to $25 a pop. :

 

Place I regularly string for pays $40 as a 30,000-40,000 daily (minus Saturdays). I've been paid $50 by major metros for prep games, paid $75 for some web stuff and out of state work.

There doesn't seem to be much of a trend or pattern. Seems to be up to the individual shop/editor/publisher.

 

The writer is not powerless, or without leverage ... and you can always say no ...

 

Damn, $15 is almost like slave labor.



One of my previous papers paid $35/story. And if it wasn't for stringers, they would never have much local content.
But they had a very weak ME and a Metro Editor that cared more about car crash photos than stories.

 

$15 a story was low 30 years ago.

 

yeah, but this is now. and since we're paying 20-25k a year for staff, why would it be better for stringers?

 

Small weekly. We play $1 per inch plus mileage, but sports is run in 9-point. I'm lucky to be able to pay someone to help, and I only got that after I told the higher-ups that if they wanted more local coverage, the one-guy-all-over wasn't going to fly.

 

We pay $40 per story but there are some perks to it.

For instance, we typically ask for a 700-900 word gamer but, since we're a weekly, you've got a shit ton of time to do it and, because we're only running publishing once a week, you can featurize it into more of a "here's what this team is up to now" story so half your story can be "this team plays these dudes next".

Other perks include being able to always turn down a story without hurting my feelings and, if you're good to us, we'll try to get you 2-3 stories per week and will almost always consider where you live when doling out assignments so you almost always get the closest game to your location.

But that's just the average stringer. We've also got an outdoor sports guy who only gets $20 a story (He writes whatever he wants so he's basically just talking about things he goes to) and there's a local photo guy who uses our newspapers to basically advertise for his web site. We print a shit ton of his pictures and cut him $40 per week regardless of what he shoots for us.

 

We pay $25 per story. We're a 16-18K daily. I think $75 is standard though, mid-sized papers and up.

 

$25 for story and $5 for each photo. I know, ridiculous. We are a 6k circulation, six-day-a-week newspaper.

Sometimes I try to massage the numbers in favor of my stringers.

 

Jeez, don't let this thread get out. When we had our last round of cuts, the stringers weren't saved.