Get real paid
White supremacist Charles Murray whines about how little he got paid for his recent NYT piece (via Think Tanked):
To all my fellow ink-stained wretches, a heads up. I got my check from the New York Times for an op ed that was published a few weeks ago. It was for $75. Not that anyone has ever paid the mortgage by writing op eds, but $75 for 800 words written for The Greatest Newspaper In the World is… how shall I put this? Weird. Do you suppose the red ink has really gotten that bad?
I’ll admit $75 isn’t much, but I actually didn’t know people got paid at all for those contributed opinion pieces. How much do the wingerati get per piece at Kaplan, I wonder?
June 21, 2010 9:58 am
Posted in: Burkean bells, Going Galt
58 Comments
58 Responses
Hunter Gathers - June 21, 2010 | 10:00 am · Link
The NYT overpaid for Murray’s ‘services’.
liberal - June 21, 2010 | 10:02 am · Link
LOL! I’ll write an op-ed for the NYT for free. In fact, I’d even be willing to pay $1000.
Capn America - June 21, 2010 | 10:02 am · Link
$75 for 800 words you can rip off Newsmax? No wonder the newspaper industry is going broke.
Linda Featheringill - June 21, 2010 | 10:07 am · Link
You mean those guys don’t have to pay the newspaper for the privilege of being published? Wow. Who knew?
MikeJ - June 21, 2010 | 10:07 am · Link
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/opeds/submit/
Let us know what you get.
RedKitten - June 21, 2010 | 10:10 am · Link
I’ve done several op-eds for newspapers and have never seen a dime—it’s free publicity for my organization, so why should they pay me for it? Maybe if they came to me and ASKED me to write a piece, I’d want some sort of compensation for my time. But otherwise, he should just be happy they printed it—there are many people who would give their eyeteeth to have a piece printed in the NYT.
kommrade reproductive vigor - June 21, 2010 | 10:10 am · Link
So, either he had some sort of agreement and knew how much he’d get paid (so why he’s whining now …) or, he just wrote it without an agreement.
Either way he’s an idiot.
Lost Left Coaster - June 21, 2010 | 10:11 am · Link
The NYT probably paid $75 too much, in my opinion.
For the record, I’ve never been paid so much as a dime for my wonderful Daily Kos diaries. Scandal
gnomedad - June 21, 2010 | 10:11 am · Link
@MikeJ:
Well, the first thing I saw was an ad.
jimBOB - June 21, 2010 | 10:11 am · Link
One of the longstanding realities of periodical publishing is that high-prestige outlets pay next to nothing for freelance content. If you want to rake in some bucks, write for the airline magazines.
The reason a writer might want something in the Times is it raises your own prestige, so you can charge more when you whore yourself out to a corporate outlet.
maya - June 21, 2010 | 10:12 am · Link
He actually accrued $1600 for his op-ed. However, the NYT deducts $1 for every letter used to correct spelling.
Dave Fud - June 21, 2010 | 10:14 am · Link
See, we all knew that the free market had broken down, and since Charles Murray couldn’t pay his mortgage with his proceeds from the NYT, we now know that the market has broken down. Clearly, his wisdom is worth billions of dollars, and he needs to get in touch with another outlet that values his contributions more.
Say, Stormfront.
jibeaux - June 21, 2010 | 10:15 am · Link
If there’s anything that no one should be paying for, it’s political opinions. Especially dumb opinions. Just try standing on a street corner trying to get folks to pay to hear your political opinions, I think that would be an excellent test of their market worth.
kommrade reproductive vigor - June 21, 2010 | 10:18 am · Link
@maya: Zing!
4tehlulz - June 21, 2010 | 10:20 am · Link
75 bucks for stale Charles Murray copypasta?
Overpaid.
MikeJ - June 21, 2010 | 10:21 am · Link
Is the text “White supremacist Charles Murray” supposed to link to something other than a 404 page?
frankdawg - June 21, 2010 | 10:22 am · Link
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Exactly!
1) He knew what he was to be paid but submitted it anyway = STFU
2) He submitted it for free & they decided to send him $75 = STFU
Although it seems to me $0 would be all I would pay to have someone smear feces on a wall I guess in the free market the NYT can pay what it likes for it.
arguingwithsignposts - June 21, 2010 | 10:22 am · Link
I think if the nyt was paying $75 for real articles in another section, this would be an outrage. On the other hand, paying Ross douchehat and David Brooks anything at all is an outrage.
DougJ - June 21, 2010 | 10:23 am · Link
@MikeJ:
Weird, I don’t know how that happened. It’s fixed now.
Jinchi - June 21, 2010 | 10:24 am · Link
Isn’t Murry already being paid by AEI to get his opinions published in major newspapers?
Why is he complaining when they actually publish them?
teejay - June 21, 2010 | 10:33 am · Link
The NYT expressed just how much they valued Murray’s (800) words.
timb - June 21, 2010 | 10:35 am · Link
Don’t understand Murray’s whinings about doing his job? Check on Jonathon Chait’s musing on “why he should have been a conservative.”
Chuck Murray is used to getting paid a lot more by the oligarchy for the shriveled remnants of his blackened soul, so he starts the whining
fucen tarmal - June 21, 2010 | 10:39 am · Link
@Lost Left Coaster:
really? soros pays me just to comment, per comment, then the other commenters usually take up a collection to pay me not to comment, which i consider, win-win.
Brien Jackson - June 21, 2010 | 10:40 am · Link
$75 for 800 words sounds like kind of a lot to me. How long does it take Murray to write an 800 word argument? Half an hour?
Brachiator - June 21, 2010 | 10:42 am · Link
The other shoe is that soon the dailies will all have to seriously re-examine what they pay syndicated columnists and on-staff pundits.
Jamie - June 21, 2010 | 10:55 am · Link
As a subscriber I still think they overpaid.
AngusTheGodOfMeat - June 21, 2010 | 10:56 am · Link
Murray appears (upon reading his recent posts) to be a complete lunatic.
Not that this has anything to do with what they paid him.
Jamie - June 21, 2010 | 11:00 am · Link
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
A slander having the virtue of being true.
Woodrowfan - June 21, 2010 | 11:14 am · Link
So, Murray wrote “I don’t like colored people” 160 times and got paid $75.00???
PaulW - June 21, 2010 | 11:31 am · Link
Seriously, $75 is kinda standard for any spec-purchased work. The real money is in getting a regular syndicated column. i get the feeling Murray figured those six-figure incomes we hear columnists earning were based on actual submissions rather than a long-term contract.
MTiffany - June 21, 2010 | 11:31 am · Link
Perhaps he’d break ten cents per word if he used polysyllabic words.
Zifnab - June 21, 2010 | 11:33 am · Link
I wonder how long it took him to crank that out? Two or three hours? $25/hr isn’t bad money salary. $37/hr isn’t terrible contract labor. If Mr Murphy can’t live on $75 / article, maybe he’s simply living beyond his means? I suggest he engage in some serious austerity measures, because we’re dealing with a guy who clearly can’t budget for himself.
People on minimum wage get $75 for roughly 10 hours of labor. Has Mr Murphy consider supplementing his newspaper income by taking a second or third job? Is it so wrong to demand this brave American live off the sweet of his brow?
Joel - June 21, 2010 | 11:38 am · Link
@MikeJ: I see Murray’s monstrous, low-density cranium just fine.
MikeJ - June 21, 2010 | 11:38 am · Link
@MTiffany: People who write at a tenth grade level are uppity.
PurpleGirl - June 21, 2010 | 12:09 pm · Link
@maya: LOL. Very good comment.
CalD - June 21, 2010 | 12:09 pm · Link
Maybe they pay some token payment for op-eds just so that the fact that they’re devoting space to them can’t be considered a gift. Still, 800 words is maybe a page of text. If you get $75 for something that takes you an hour to write, that $75 an hour. If it takes two hours, it’s still $37.50/hr. If it takes three hours, that’s probably still better wages than most people who can’t write 800 words about their opinion of something in two hours time are making. I did a word count before posting this and there are over one hundred words in this post. I’d take 10 bucks for it, no problem.
PurpleGirl - June 21, 2010 | 12:14 pm · Link
PaulW and Zifnab have the right idea of what happened. It does come out to just under ten cents a word which seems to be pretty standard these day. The idiot should stop whining. (They beat me to it and also said it better than I would have.)
Martin - June 21, 2010 | 12:36 pm · Link
Chucky forgot to pass along the letter that went with it.
Barry - June 21, 2010 | 12:43 pm · Link
Gosh, for $75 I could buy enough paper of Murray’s quality to fill my whole car. I don’t have enough storage place in the bathroom, however.
El Cid - June 21, 2010 | 12:49 pm · Link
Something tells me that the supply of conservative whites who think that blacks are generally dumber is greater than the demand, so it would be hard for Murray to argue that his services are rare and thus valuable.
Southern Beale - June 21, 2010 | 12:52 pm · Link
Oh fuck you Charles Murray, $75 for 800 words? That’s LUXURY by today’s devalued freelance standards. Try writing for Demand Studios or one of those word sausage factories and see how you like it.
Zifnab - June 21, 2010 | 12:59 pm · Link
@El Cid: They are apparently in high demand, however. Why else would the NYT publish them? Perhaps Murphy’s rhetoric is equivalent to oil. A foundational fuel of the economy that must be mined in hazardous locations. His column pay $75, about the price of a barrel of light sweet crude. And an explosion of his rhetoric has decimated the Gulf Coast states. I like this metaphor and choose to run with it.
Alex - June 21, 2010 | 1:03 pm · Link
If anyone’s curious, the NYT pays $200 for a crossword ($1000 for a Sunday!) —some might argue that writing one of those takes more work than spewing out an op-ed.
SB Jules - June 21, 2010 | 1:27 pm · Link
A client of mine got paid $200 by the L.A. Times for an op-ed.
kommrade reproductive vigor - June 21, 2010 | 1:33 pm · Link
via Sadly, No!: Johan Loededhosen is whining about this, also2.
ellaesther - June 21, 2010 | 1:35 pm · Link
As someone who was once a pretty darn successful freelance opinion writer—which is to say that for about five years, I placed something somewhere at least once a month but generally more frequently than that, appearing over and over again in my hometown Chicago Tribune and the much-farther-afield Dallas Morning News, and adding a new publication to my list about ever four-six weeks—I’d say: Yup. $75 doesn’t surprise me much.
I was usually paid more than that, but never more than $150 for commentary (sometimes more for book reviews, which I still write, and generally more for features), but I suspect that at the NYT, one is also expected to accept prestige as part of the pay-packet—the clip assumed to be worth at least as much as the flat-rate. I’m guessing.
Also, the reason I finally just threw up my hands and in the towel was that even that small puddle of cash/publication possibilities began to dry up and/or disappear entirely two years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, for instance, that the Times paid more in 2008 than they do in 2010.
BombIranForChrist - June 21, 2010 | 1:35 pm · Link
Just think, the Huffington Post pays the Baldwin brothers nothing for them to come on and rant about hair products, or whatever it is they care about.
El Cid - June 21, 2010 | 1:43 pm · Link
@Zifnab:
True, the billion dollar media like to semi-regularly publish authors and pieces on how blacks are dumber, but since the complaint was that $75 was too low, I was just noting that the supply was obviously so much greater than demand that a paltry $75 could be paid by the billion dollar New York Times for another column for a guy who likes to use shitty and distorted statistics to affirm his notion that blacks on average are dumber.
Uloborus - June 21, 2010 | 2:14 pm · Link
@Zifnab:
And let’s face it, this explosion was inevitable as laxer and laxer regulatory practices have given permits to drill for conservative rhetoric to every Tom, Dick, and Mooney. They went into this with no exit plan for capping the spray of racist filth, a government subject to extreme industry capture, and an attitude that more was always better – and now look where we are.
asiangrrlMN - June 21, 2010 | 3:10 pm · Link
@maya: Best comment. Let’s see…I can write a 3,000-word blog entry in an hour (which I just did). That means I could write an 800-word op-ed piece in fifteen minutes. $75 for fifteen minutes? Hell, yeah, I’d take it. And, I agree with the others who said that I would let the NYT publish an op-ed from me for free (like they would) just for the exposure.
Jackass.
canuckistani - June 21, 2010 | 5:21 pm · Link
How does $75 break down?
$20 for Cheetos
$30 for comic books
$5 for an Ann Coulter poster
$2 for kleenex
$3 for hand lotion
$10 for diet root beer
$5 token “rent” to his mom.
He could write one of these a week and live like a king!
fucen tarmal - June 21, 2010 | 7:52 pm · Link
@canuckistani:
you really think that this guy is gonna use a kleenex, i bet he smears it on his jeans orange crumbs and all…
that is 2 bucks in his retirement fund…
matoko_chan - June 21, 2010 | 8:55 pm · Link
Murray isn’t a white supremacist, DougJ.
He isn’t a racist, he’s an IQist.
He is an elitist intellectual snob.
like me i guess.
;)
mvr - June 21, 2010 | 10:21 pm · Link
So does the fact that he seems to only be in it for the money make his advocacy of noxious “opinions” more or less culpable?
Sgt. Jrod and his Howling Commandos - June 21, 2010 | 10:32 pm · Link
@matoko_chan: Um, do you really wanna place yourself in the company of Charles Murray? I mean, we all knew you were a little… off, but I’d sooner admit to bathing in pig entrails than to being like Charles Murray in any way.
Kerry Reid - June 21, 2010 | 11:37 pm · Link
I get paid more for a 125-word capsule theater review than Murray made. This makes me happy.
jacquie blacque - June 22, 2010 | 12:50 pm · Link
Murray is a white supremacist, dougj …
He claims to be an iqist, to hide the fact he’s a racist..
He is an elitist anti-intellectual nob.
fixed
Kered (formerly Derek) - June 22, 2010 | 1:11 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill:
I am seriously actually surprised this isn’t the case.