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?
Hunter Gathers
The NYT overpaid for Murray’s ‘services’.
liberal
LOL! I’ll write an op-ed for the NYT for free. In fact, I’d even be willing to pay $1000.
Capn America
$75 for 800 words you can rip off Newsmax? No wonder the newspaper industry is going broke.
Linda Featheringill
You mean those guys don’t have to pay the newspaper for the privilege of being published? Wow. Who knew?
MikeJ
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/opeds/submit/
Let us know what you get.
RedKitten
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
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
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
@MikeJ:
Well, the first thing I saw was an ad.
jimBOB
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
He actually accrued $1600 for his op-ed. However, the NYT deducts $1 for every letter used to correct spelling.
Dave Fud
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
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
@maya: Zing!
4tehlulz
75 bucks for stale Charles Murray copypasta?
Overpaid.
MikeJ
Is the text “White supremacist Charles Murray” supposed to link to something other than a 404 page?
frankdawg
@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
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
@MikeJ:
Weird, I don’t know how that happened. It’s fixed now.
Jinchi
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
The NYT expressed just how much they valued Murray’s (800) words.
timb
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
@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
$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
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
As a subscriber I still think they overpaid.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
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
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
A slander having the virtue of being true.
Woodrowfan
So, Murray wrote “I don’t like colored people” 160 times and got paid $75.00???
PaulW
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
Perhaps he’d break ten cents per word if he used polysyllabic words.
Zifnab
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
@MikeJ: I see Murray’s monstrous, low-density cranium just fine.
MikeJ
@MTiffany: People who write at a tenth grade level are uppity.
PurpleGirl
@maya: LOL. Very good comment.
CalD
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
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
Chucky forgot to pass along the letter that went with it.
Barry
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
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
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
@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
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
A client of mine got paid $200 by the L.A. Times for an op-ed.
kommrade reproductive vigor
via Sadly, No!: Johan Loededhosen is whining about this, also2.
ellaesther
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
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
@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
@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
@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
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
@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
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
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
@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
I get paid more for a 125-word capsule theater review than Murray made. This makes me happy.
jacquie blacque
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)
@Linda Featheringill:
I am seriously actually surprised this isn’t the case.