How much is a piece of journalism worth? As much as my fellow journalists and I wish it were otherwise, the value of our work is, unfortunately, what the market will pay – not what we feel we deserve or used to earn back in the good old days.
Over the past decade, as the news industry has imploded, editors and publishers have been paying less and less for articles. And it’s only going to get worse.
If I want to earn what I believe my work merits, there remains just one option – to reach out directly to readers.
With my newly launched crowdfunding campaign, I’m doing just that. My goal is to find at least 500 readers prepared to pony up a minimum of $10 each for a series of articles about a fascinating and important sexual assault trial, a surprising verdict, and the upcoming appeal. Backers will receive the articles via an email newsletter and be publicly thanked if they so wish.
I set my total funding goal at $5,000 based on the value of my time and because I believe I have a decent chance of finding 500 readers. It’s a leap-of-faith business plan inspired partly by the reaction to a similar but different series I wrote last year for the Walrus magazine. By all measures, that series was a major success. It got loads of page views, great reader feedback, and a National Magazine Award nomination.
The only problem was that I was paid next to nothing for my weeks of labour – $1,500 to be exact. At the time, I was okay with that. I had embarked on the series as a kind of loss leader and the strategy worked. It helped convince Penguin Random House to contract with me to write Dark Ambition: The Shocking Crime of Dellen Millard and Mark Smich. Two other publishers have since approached me about more court-related projects. And the Walrus recently suggested I might like to write another courtroom series.
In fact, it was that suggestion from the Walrus that caused me to decide that $5,000 is my bottom line and pushed me to embark on this experiment. While I know that people want to read what I write, I still don’t know how much they are prepared to pay for it, if anything. Now, I’m about to find out.
At this point, you may be wondering if $10 is too steep a price for a series of articles when you can get a high-quality magazine for less, but I would argue that none of those magazines offer what I’m offering. As a reader, I know I’m prepared to pay $10 to read original material about a topic that interests me.
As my Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a series of journalism articles officially launches, I have no idea whether it will succeed or fail. I’m hoping for the best and prepared for the worst.
Click here to see the campaign and back the project
Next on the diary: The theory of 1,000 true fans.