The Amateurization of Everything: Part 2
More thoughts on what happens when a career becomes a hobby.
Shortly after I started writing full-time in the late 1990s, I attended a freelance journalists’ networking party and mentioned to another writer that the market looked pretty good to me; there was a lot of work.
“Yeah,” he said. “But pay rates have been stuck at a dollar a word since the eighties.”
For those unfamiliar with current rates, $1 a word would thrill most established writers today—in real dollars, not adjusted for inflation. It’s also true that that writer’s opinion was commonplace—the $1-a-word standard was considered outdated back then.
Early last year, I wrote about how the erosion of writer pay turned my journalism career into a hobby, and I shared my concerns that I’m now helping to amateurize the jobs of other professionals, like graphic designers and podcasters, through this newsletter.
It became my most popular post ever; more than a year later it gets reposted a few times a week. Many readers were blown away by the 2000…