The price of quality?

About 40 cents a word. Maybe a little more. That’s what good journalism costs. Seriously.

This is a long running rant of mine, one that I know quite a few other freelance journalists agree with. It usually starts when someone who doesn’t work in the media criticises the standards of journalism found here, usually in the same breath as saying something like “Ooh, the Sunday Times is fantastic, it always has these great seven page features where a journalist has spent three months living with a tribe in the Amazon. You never see anything like that in Irish newspapers.”

And of course, they’re right, you don’t see anything like that in Irish newspapers, but there’s a good reason – no Irish journalist can financially afford to write anything like that. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do that, and pretty much every hack I know would also love to do likewise - it would be fantastic fun and professionally very gratifying.

However the only reason that newspapers like The Sunday Times can run things like that is that the person who wrote the piece will probably get paid £10,000 for the piece. Seriously. That kind of money allows a writer to take the time to research and write in depth quality journalism, and the Sunday Times can afford to pay like that because it’s an English newspaper with access to much higher advertising revenues and sales figures.

In Ireland, newspapers have nothing like that market share, and they pay nowhere near enough for journalists to justify taking the time and effort it would require to do this kind of work.

For the uninitiated, there are two kinds of journalists working on national newspapers in Ireland, freelance and staff. Staff members are exactly what they sound like, full time employees but most news organisations being what they are – commercial organisations – few will give staff members the time to spend weeks at a time researching stories, when they have immediate pressing deadlines and page space to fill. Features must be written in hours and days, not weeks and months.

(Witness the growth of opinion-led feature writing in Irish newspapers as a consequence, as this cheap and cheerful type of writing costs virtually nothing to produce.)

So against this backdrop, the job of feature writing tends to land on the desks of freelance journalist at least some of the time. Freelances are not full-time staff members but rather self employed writers who tend to work for several different newspapers and magazines at a time.

The life of the freelance is one of generating feature ideas and using them to secure commissions or as is usually the case when you have a good relationship with a newspaper, working with a commissioning editor when they come to you with their requirements.

So if freelances have the ability to suggest in-depth, research-based feature writing to commissioning editors, why aren’t more writers in Ireland producing these epic Hemmingway-esque features, spanning 20 magazine pages of glorious glossy print?

Easy, it doesn’t pay. The average freelance writer in Ireland is lucky to be earning 20 cent a word, and if they are fresh out of college or new to the profession they are probably earning 15 cent a word. If they are very experienced and in some demand, they may, if they are lucky, earn up to 25 cent a word and consider themselves lucky to do so.

Faced with these sorts of rates, the only way to make a reasonable living is to churn copy – to make sure you are throwing out several large features a week, and as a result, it’s not commercially viable to invest as much time as any of us would like in research.

Amazingly, the rates paid for news stories are largely the same as that paid for feature articles, unless the news story happens to be of earth shattering significance, in which case you can usually negotiate a better rate. Even so, faced with the amount of work and the difficulty involved in researching a 500 word news story, most freelance journalists won’t bother. Such work can take you the best part of a day or possibly more to do, and you’ll probably be paid the princely sum of €100 or €200. Seriously, that’s not much more than someone earns flipping burgers for an eight hour shift.

For freelances, the small section at the beginning of the NUJ’s infrequent freelance periodical – Rate for the Job - which details the rates news organisations pay throughout Ireland and the UK is the professional equivalent of journalistic porn. The good ones make you drool – some papers in the UK pay up to €1 per word for 1000 word features.

In the US, it’s not uncommon for national newspapers and glossy magazines to pay as much as $5 to $10 per word. Obviously there’s a lot of competition for work like this, but if someone is willing to pay you $10,000 for a 1,000 word feature, you can be sure that you will take the time to research it and write it properly, even if that means sitting up a tree at the bottom of the Amazon basin living off ants and moss for weeks at a time.