Eating with writers

Had dinner with several Portland freelance writers...all whip-smart, all good conversationalists, all underpaid. A local publication for which we've all written picked up the tab.

I miss the expense-account days where I could take such a group to dinner myself. The message at those occasions was always Hell, I can't pay you what you're worth, but The Company can pop for a nice meal, we can have a great conversation, and you can walk away knowing you're appreciated as a writer, even if your paycheck doesn't reflect that.

Those days are dwindling, and I'm not sure they'll ever come back in any substantial way, unless you're a senior editor at Conde Nast or something. The message at the corporate level (of every company) seems to be We're making fine profits, but it could be better, and YOU are the reason our profits were spectacular this quarter, but not ultra-spectacular.

It's YOUR fault. Not ours.

Profits are great - they keep us all working - but freelance writers are pathetically grateful for scraps. A $40 lunch and a kind word can instill a loyalty to a publication that all the stock options in the world can't buy. Most writers, in my experience, aren't profligate with the money of others; their natural instinct is to keep things close to the bone, the same way they do with their own writing. (At least, that's the instinct of the good ones; I can't vouch for the Hollywood types.)

And now I read that Meier & Frank, the venerable old Portland department store, has been taken over by Macy's, which doesn't believe in newspaper advertising...and The Oregonian is expected to lose in the neighborhood of $2 million a year from loss of ads. And if you think that money is going to come out of the pockets of executives rather than the newsroom folks....

The $40 lunch and a kind word can reap benefits and loyalty that the beancounters can't fit in to their Excel sheets and their year-end reports. But there's a sad meme in the journalism world these days, a meme that says Writing is the rubber cement that holds the ads together, and the older I get, the more I see publishers resenting the rubber cement. (Tonight's company excepted.)

Anyway, it was a nice dinner.

Comments

[Rabbit]

Very sad and very true. I write for the section of our paper that generates the most advertising -- basically, we pay the lion's share of the whole paper's bills -- and you're so right about the rubber cement. I'm fortunate in that I have an editor who appreciates what we do; alas, he's bound by a budget, and the millions we bring in sure don't trickle down. And I know that the powers-that-be would be thrilled if we were dispensed with altogether, and the section simply became One Big Advertisement.

And we don't even get the $40 meals.