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No, this gets even better

So, our bloke who did the English BA and MA and has $100,000 in student loan debt. Turns out he’s an editor at the NY Times. And his loan repayments are $1,100 a month or so.

And, err, you know?

Anyone who can actually get hired at the NY Times can find a grand’s worth of freelance work a month. That’s a trivial task, seriously. No, really, putting together freelance gigs to make $5,000 or $10,000 a month is tough, very. But an extra $1,000? It’s 700 to 1400 words a week, one or two pieces! And that’s at the bargain internet pay rates, let alone print.

Which does actually tell us something interesting about the NY Times. It’s written by the sort of people who can’t get $1,000 a month as a freelance.

8 thoughts on “No, this gets even better”

  1. I’ve known professional journalists who have struggled to get a foot in to the freelancing ladder, to be fair not at the likes of the NYT but competent professionals nevertheless. So I’m not so sure that getting that much freelancing work per month is an “easy” task.

    If it is, then given how much writing I turn out on blog comment pages, perhaps I should redirect my energies in a more remunerative direction…

  2. I suspect that to get such freelancing opportunities you need the experience to know where to ask. Or a mentor possessed of said experience.
    I guess you also need experience or at least knowledge of some subject matter.
    So the NYT employs people who know nothing beyond what was covered in their degrees, and hence have nothing to say.
    It’s beginning to sound as though education is overvalued.

  3. Well, I got my gig at Forbes through Ritchie.

    He said he’d been hired by them. For real money.

    So, I called them up and said they should hire me too.

    So, they did.

    No, real story, true story that is.

  4. What does the title ‘editor’ mean at a US paper? I suspect it can be little more than a glorified teaboy. (And some UK papers seem to be travelling the same route.)

    It’s a means of pacifying people who are getting paid not very much by giving them a grandiose title they can brag about,

  5. “Chris Miller

    What does the title ‘editor’ mean at a US paper? I suspect it can be little more than a glorified teaboy.”

    There is much debasing of titles these days.

    ‘Professor’ used to mean something.

    Now it can mean as little as ‘a glorified twat’

  6. The consultant class in the late 1980s convinced businesses that they should get rid of middle management. The elimination of editors was one outcome. There were many more . . . disasters.

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